Barkinado Bocoum

Barkinado’s work often resembles an assembly of mosaics, each a part of something infinitely larger, and each oddly unsettling the other parts and yet they come together in a beautiful whole. The origin of this style of painting is simple in that initially he lacked the resources to purchase proper canvases and so he used simple A4 papers. As he filled each one, he simply added more and more of them, taping them together to create large figurative works. Later he realized that taping them together and off center seems to refract light and images in complex fractured portraits.Though each sheet has its own significance taken together they weave a whole albeit with multiple and distinctive perspectives. The gaze of his subjects is often weary and melancholy - almost as if their incredible beauty is too heavy a load to carry. It is this gaze that lends the added perspective of a peoples gazed upon - looking back at the world with a deep understanding that almost says: ‘you can’t even begin to understand me.’

As the website Urban Africans cites: “The different patches are symbolic of the idea that the ‘truth’ is made up of multiple perspectives. Barkinado explains: “Everyone has different emotions; you can be happy, angry, sad … all these emotions hide in one person. This is the same for objects. Everything has multiple perspectives. THAT is the truth. It’s not only the outside of a person that counts, that’s just one perspective. But there are elements to each of us which have not yet come out, because we have not lived through a certain situation that brings that part of us out. If you take all these elements together you get the real individual.” He looks at it just as a human body; all parts of the body are different, but each part has its own reason for being. He puts an equal amount of energy and power into every part he creates. He constructs and deconstructs to obtain the inequality of parts.”