Yvanovitch Mbaya

From the Congo. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, Brazzaville.

Originally from Congo, Yvanovitch Mbaya makes of painting a space of passage, between elements, beliefs and buried memories. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Brazzaville, he anchors his practice in a deep listening to the world, in which every gesture becomes prayer, every material a sign.

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His work is traversed by a singular substance: coffee, which he uses as his principal pigment. This choice is in no way anecdotal; it is ritual. In the density of coffee, Mbaya finds a living, organic, almost breathing matter. Its brown tint, at once earthy and luminous, becomes the memory of the soil, the sap of vegetation, the blood of the plant. On the canvas it spreads, infiltrates, sometimes evaporates, leaving unruly traces, like memories that fade without ever disappearing.

For him, to paint with coffee is to invoke Mother Earth and the ancestral forces she holds. It is to reconnect with an Africa in which matter speaks, in which every nuance carries a history. Water, omnipresent in his process, merges its fluidity with that of the coffee: from their union are born interior landscapes, spectral figures, architectures of the soul.

Yvanovitch Mbaya’s work is a spiritual crossing, a journey against the current of the visible. Forms dissolve into mists of ochre and brown; faces seem to emerge from an ancient dream; textures evoke skin, mud, night. It is an art of passage, of memory, of slow combustion, a painting that breathes, infiltrates, remembers.

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