Untitled Tête

Ivorian painter Aboudia evokes the energy and danger of West African urban life through frenetic palimpsests of paint and crayon. In Untitled Tête, a Basquiat-esque visage emerges from a vibrant, marbled background of splashed acrylic, with blue and black playing off against the dominant green, white and orange hues of the Ivory Coast flag. The features are outlined in strong, graphic black with scrawled haloes of red, green and white. His cartoonish eyes point in different directions as if beset by madness or delirium; their ovoid forms echo the shape of what looks like a gas mask affixed over his mouth. The artist’s home city of Abidjan has been the site of ongoing violence and unrest since a post-electoral crisis in 2011 sparked a new civil war in the Ivory Coast. The crazed expression and frenzied paintwork of Untitled Tête body forth a vision of a man surrounded by chaos, capturing a sense of strife and conflict with urgent vitality.