La Grande Fanfare, 2021

Enfant Précoce / Francis Essoua Kalu   Emerging artists

Enfant Précoce is a painter, born in Cameroon in 1989. He discovered art with his uncle Malam Essoua, sculptor, whose life as a free artist inspired him. Then he dances.

This first love for movement led Francis Essoua alias Enfant Précoce to painting, with which he fell in love in 2013. His canvases mix bodies, sometimes stretched, sometimes relaxed, hands apart, legs projected between African faces and masks. A thousand and one colors bloom. It is the color of children's tales.

Enfant Précoce tells us stories that touch on the universal. The world takes the form of a myth animated by its characters like apparitions captured in color and disproportion. The storyteller's voice is in our eyes. Everywhere the look. He questions, he evaluates. Something of a presence, the gesture, inhabits his creations, apparently spontaneous, but which, nevertheless, obey a constraint.

And while Enfant Précoce shares, Enfant Précoce goes on a quest. Triangles nose, clover nose; fleshy or scarlet mouths; large hands and open hands; flower garden… he explores. His paintings are an invitation to decipher signs, rebuses, symbols; invitation to play on cultural variations. At the end, obviously, the emotion.