Amoako Boafo, 2022. Photographie de Fabrice Gousset.
We revisit the Ghanaian painter's cosmic destiny
Sensitive and obsessively rendered, the faces in Amoako Boafo’s paintings tell their subject’s innermost stories. At times placid, radiant, or serious, these faces of people from Accra, familiar from the artist’s childhood, are portrayed on canvases measuring up to two meters-square. Most of the time, the characters are isolated in simple and intimate settings, occasionally broken up by striking washes of color. Together, they form an authentic portrait gallery that the artist has been enriching over the past decade, particularly in his ongoing series ‘Black Diaspora’. But how can we explain the worldwide clamor for this painter’s works, whose subjects and compositions seem, all told, to be rather classical?
