Untitled

Through Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga's paintings we are introduced to the cultural diversity of contemporary Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Africa’s third largest metropolis – transformed through an imaginary space of symbols and abstracted form. In Sans titre, a cropped image of a glamorous woman emphasises her heels, handbag and vibrant patterned skirt. The skirt’s orange and black design escapes as abstract squares into a background textured with mysterious scriptural marks. Ilunga’s works mediate the mass influence of globalisation on African identity, emphasising the continent’s intrinsic plurality and hybrid cosmopolitanism. A mixture of ancient and modern writings – a kind of visual Esperanto inspired by the communicative strategies of modern advertising – forms the backdrop for his fashionable subjects. Population-sweeping civil wars, and even the atrocities of the present day, are a world away from Ilunga’s brightly-hued images of a utopian society. Included in the 2014 Saatchi exhibition ‘Pangaea: New art from Africa and Latin America’, his works speak of a young culture enraptured by commercialist life, grappling with the new joys and anxieties born of African urbanism.