Gombo

Painter and animation filmmaker artist, Gombo is of mixed French, Congolese, Angolan, and Brazilian heritage. He started drawing as a kid, when he was living with his parents in Angola. The country was going through an unprecedented political crisis which was disrupting the lives of its people. Lonely and trapped in his isolation, to pass the time while he was confined indoors, he found refuge in cartoons recorded on VHS tapes, sent by his maternal grandparents in France. These heroes began to infiltrate his imagination, slowly pushing him into the world of drawing. Back in France, he carried on feeding this appetite up to university, and quickly found his way into the world of animation and lit upon the career of story boarder in the entertainment industry.

The artist begin to work on projects that are more introspective, when he falls in love with wax prints shops inthe African neighborhood of Paris “Chateau Rouge”, where he used to live at the time. This emblematic fabric situated at a crossroads between three continents – Europe, Asia and Africa, brings him back to his own mixed identity, a multiculturalism the artist wants to interrogate through his work.
Including digital drawing, screen printing, and textile design, his painting, explore the history of the representation of the black body in European painting. Mixing his influences from cartoon, congolese figurative painting, and wax prints, Gombo draws interconnections between Africa, Europe and the American space from his Afro-descendant point of view.