YAOFRANCK

Yaofranck, whose real name is Yao Franck Kouassi Salomon, is an Ivorian painter and performance artist born in 1999 in Yabayo, in the heart of the Bas-Sassandra region. He studied at the Lycée d’Enseignement Artistique and later at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan (ENBA), where he earned a bachelor's degree in mural art followed by a master's degree in painting. He is currently pursuing both practical and theoretical research within the Master’s program in Contemporary Art and Human Sciences at Paris 8 University in Saint-Denis.

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Since childhood, Yaofranck has maintained a vital connection with artistic creation. Orphaned by his father at the age of two and raised by his mother, a preschool director, he took refuge early on in drawing, which he describes as a space of solace and rebirth. This visceral and restorative relationship with art gradually evolved into a committed vocation.

Deeply marked by the sociopolitical tensions in his country (the civil wars of 2002 and 2010, and interethnic conflicts), Yaofranck transforms lived experience into artistic matter. He is a key figure in Braid’art, a movement born within the studios of the Beaux-Arts in Abidjan, which champions a “mixed,” “undisciplined” form of art, breaking with academic standards and Western aesthetic canons. Initially used pejoratively (“braid” meaning “ugly” or “messy” in local slang), the term is now proudly reclaimed as an aesthetic of fusion, hybridity, and unapologetic identity. For Yaofranck, Braid’art represents both cultural and formal reappropriation — a pictorial form of contemporary Négritude.

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His artistic practice — at the crossroads of mural art, painting, stained glass, mosaic, and tapestry — is deeply hybrid. He works on large formats such as walls, metal sheets, plywood, and canvas, with a preference for raw or recycled materials. He blends spray paint, acrylics, brushes, compressors, and sponges to create vibrant textures and compositions where the gesture is as important as the motif.

His work explores the relationship between humans and the sacred through the mask — particularly the Gla mask of the Bété people — a symbol of peace and spirituality. By merging the mask with human features, Yaofranck elevates humanity to a higher dimension where spirit transcends flesh. He also incorporates essential elements of Ivorian culture, such as raffia and ovoids (fruits worn as necklaces), which serve as carriers of memory and ancestral connection.

In his paintings, every net mesh or spray trace becomes a fragment of storytelling, a symbolic attempt to "heal" a fragmented world. The artist questions the notion of functional beauty: for him, beauty lies in connection, solidarity, and shared humanity — far more than in surface appearance.

Inspired by figures such as Banksy and Basquiat, Yaofranck embraces a free form of art, in tension between figuration and abstraction, between tradition and contemporaneity. Underlying his entire body of work is a fundamental question: How can harmony emerge from chaos? How can meaning, dignity, and beauty be restored to what has been broken?

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Now based between in Paris, Yaofranck is a emerging voice on the contemporary African art scene. His work — both sensitive and political — outlines an art of repair.