Romario Lukau

Romario is a pure product of the Congolese avant-garde school, that of young creators who know how to adapt modern painting techniques to the enhancement of ancestral traditions. Moreover, he is a co-founding member of the "Tokeyi" collective, which means "Let's go forward! "in Lingala.

A group of young artists from Kinshasa who are committed to development and research in the arts and are known for their ability to innovate on the basis of endogenous themes. Romario's trademark are the small, multiform, multicoloured tiles that appear on the human bodies in his paintings. The artist explains: "I am inspired by African history, and more precisely, by the writing on the skin, the marks, the scarifications that are coded forms of knowledge that our ancestors used to organise society; I want to resurrect these values that were lost because of colonisation.

Sometimes it is his own body that Romario exposes to the public, it is on himself, on his own skin that he gets his message across. A quest for innovation, an original artistic behaviour which is already a long process for this young painter. Born in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1994, he was precocious, pushing his parents to enrol him very early in the Institute of Fine Arts. He continued his university studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in painting in 2015. Romario has already had several exhibitions at home and elsewhere, notably in Côte d'Ivoire and France.

C’est à Kinshasa qu’il vit et travaille, créant et recherchant méthodiquement des techniques et des performances pouvant lui permettre de témoigner de l’histoire africaine mais aussi de son temps : « Je m’inspire aussi de l’actualité, de ce qui me touche, des questions personnelles, des questionnements de l’humanité, sur le réchauffement climatique, la pollution de l’environnement… A travers mon art, j’entame une discussion sur les choses que je crois comprendre de ce qui m’entoure. » déclare-t-il.