Koffi Mounou Désiré

Biography :

Barely out of the Beaux-Arts, the international art scene opens its doors wide. Collective exhibitions in Ivory Coast (his country), Morocco and most recently in Belgium; At the age of 24, the artist is counting among the most important figures of contemporary Ivorian painting.

Born on October 28, 1994 in the city of Buyo (in the South-West of Ivory Coast), Mounou Désiré Koffi has always had a path all traced in the world of art. Passionate about drawing since childhood, his vocation asserts itself very early when he wins a competition while he is still in primary school. His school guidance is all found. After graduating from the Artistic High School (LEA) in Abidjan, where he graduated from his class, he joined Beaux-Arts in the same city to obtain a bachelor's degree.

Mounou Désiré makes a happy marriage between impressionism and figurative art. He asserts his own style by pushing the boundaries of painting with a touch as seductive as unpredictable. This is because the artist has decided to give a second life to mobile phones users. So he uses keyboards and screens to draw human silhouettes, which he inserts into realistic and colorful urban settings. The resolutely ecological approach is none the less aesthetic; offering original reliefs and a look quite pleasant on the streets of Dakar or Adjamé commercial district in Abidjan.

The works of Mounou Désiré Koffi have won the hearts of many amateurs, but also knowledgeable collectors who already see the bright future that is emerging for the young painter.

Artistic approach :

Work in progress, Mounou's artistic approach is essentially influenced by his environment. Urban landscapes are its frameworks par excellence. The painter's reflection is guided by what they represent. It attacks a dehumanizing modern world. Moving bodies in these paintings are busy with their own affairs. They do not communicate, do not meet. Dwarfed in the capitalist system, these people are only interested in their means of subsistence and are bogged down in a routine that makes them insensitive to their surroundings.

Although it may seem dark, Mounou presents it in a bright, colorful, illustrating the atmosphere and warmth of these spaces swarming with time-pressed world. His point of view is not Manichean. He does not denounce automatically. He sees and opens the debate. The distance between men is growing as technology evolves. This evolution is presented with genius by the artist. Like a metonymy, he uses mobile phone keypads to express the concept of technological evolution.

Composed of keyboards, men are no more than machines that gradually and unconsciously lose their share of humanity. As a result, we end up with a society that is no longer bothered by physical relationships, real attention away from the virtual, which lapses into its laziness and resolves all these imperatives through digital, which leaves its opinion to be defined by the networks. without really worrying about the reality outside this factitious world in the end.

The relief applied to the paintings of Mounou has from then on of interest in the form but also and especially in the bottom. With his keyboards he brings an aesthetic relief to these landscapes, then raises the issues of our time. It proposes a recycling technique for electronic waste, a real headache for manufacturers and a scourge for humanity. Resolutely contemporary, wise, and attentive to his time, he is not frozen. Hence the transition between the keyboard and the touch screens that appear in these tables. These screens that he applies to the feet of his characters as broken glasses, symbol of the double edge of new technologies.