Freedom in movement

Originally from Cameroon, which he fled for reasons of personal security, the self-taught painter Salvador Tomnyuy does not hesitate to present himself as a Moroccan painter. It was first in this host country that he discovered painting which constituted an outlet for him, a real lifeline. Painting to exist, to survive: if not a vocation, painting here is an inner necessity. Firing on all cylinders, endowed with a combative energy like no other, he began to paint on tram tickets or recycled paper images of boxers whose free representation is striking for its vitality and its profusion of colors. Painting very quickly became an intensive practice that Salvador carried out with the regularity and endurance of an athlete, but above all the extreme concentration of an ascetic. He paints as one gives blow after blow, facing a destiny which always takes pleasure in persisting.

Having not received a new residence visa to return to his adopted country, he continues to move where more hospitable winds are willing to welcome him. It is in Dakar that he now finds refuge and, thanks to the help of a few close friends, begins to indulge again in his passion for painting with the tenacity of a fighter who never gives up. count. Placing his current work under the sign of freedom – and in particular the freedom of movement to which a large part of his African brothers aspire – the painter breathes new life into his favorite figures, with eyes bulging with the thirst for life, but no doubt also through fear, and with angry fists. These hybrid creatures whose bodies always give the impression of having been swaddled or tied up in an invisible straitjacket, seem to aspire to an uncertain hatching. Their outline is often drawn in charcoal and their heads, enhanced with a crown, are distant reminiscences of Basquiat's characters, always in search of the kingdom of the dispossessed and the freed. The use of coal is not a vanity here; from the dust that emanates from it, the artist perceives all the fragility of our existence. As it says in Genesis, shall we not all return to dust?

In these paintings, expressiveness is essential, and in the figurative freedom which is his, the painter rediscovers the spontaneity of the gesture of the graphists. He does not hesitate to enhance his use of acrylic paint with aerosol cans as if to better demonstrate an inner rage pushing him to create. Sometimes, sandy soil is used as reinforcement and gives the canvas the nervous texture of a wall fresco. A face-to-face encounter worthy of a boxing match confronts the artist with the canvas on which he affixes his peaceful slogans, here taking the form of subtle gestures of tenderness, outstretched hands or sketching a fraternal greeting. Like borders, hands can open in an attempt at reconciliation always to be sought between human brothers, but they can also close into fists embodying both the spirit of revenge and resistance. It is in this dialectic of opening-closing that freedom can blossom. A freedom of movement which is also that of the pictorial gesture.

A unique series of paintings made entirely on recycled paper, the brilliant gold color of which here seems to sublimate everyday wounds, once again summons the figures of boxers dear to the artist. Their morphology is as reminiscent of African statuary as the free figuration of Keith Haring. In his quest for freedom, the artist embraces the plurality of his influences, as if art had the virtue of being able to reconcile opposites. It is by drawing from a repertoire of universal shapes and symbols that the gestural freedom of painters, always eager for freedom and this “free freedom” of which the poet Arthur Rimbaud spoke, is perpetuated.

Olivier Rachet