Oiseau de mauvaise augure, 2021

William Bakaïmo  

Since the age of 5 he has not stopped drawing and thus built his own world. He obtained a license in fundamental private law and a master's degree in business law. In 2017 he obtained a design engineering degree in fine arts and decided to devote himself definitively to painting.

The third child of a family that knows eight, this position gives him responsibilities despite an unspeakable fear of the next day that grips him; fight to meet permanent needs.

In the north-west of Cameroon, he suffers from an isolation which, even if it is conducive to creation, turns out to be a brake on pursuing an artistic career.

Another change is announced, rich, abundant, astonishing. The one where the young man transforms reality into a world created from scratch, a labyrinth where doubts rub shoulders with contradictions, hope wins over fears. The artist takes precedence over an environment that suits him less even if he remains very attached to his family and to the duty incumbent on him.

2017 and 2018 are pivotal years when he painted his first masterpieces. Then begins the great moult, the transformation of the young man into an artist carrying many messages where hope prevails over darkness.

THE LIZARD THAT SLEEPING IN ME ...

The work of WILLIAM BAKAIMO is a great dreamlike bestiary where humans are not humans, where animals are not animals. In this strange ark of Noah, the imagination and the dream are carved out a considerable part to describe a reality which escapes more and more to the artist. He scrambles the tracks to restore pictures that question.

These hybrid figures, half men, half birds or other rare species belong to the phantasmagoric garden of its creator. As he says himself: "the lizard that sleeps in me sheds its skin every time to become a new man." In this the little reptile often returns in his paintings as an animal emblematic of hope, of rediscovered happiness, of the painter who is constantly renewing himself.

Each painting gives rise to many readings because what is most secret in it is surprisingly linked to its direct environment or to a news that impacts his life and his pictorial universe.

In the strange bestiary, there is what lives and pulsates in his heart but also other dramas that plague the African continent. He reconciles internal revolts and other more conscious struggles. For example, the acts of terrorism perpetrated by Boko Haram deeply marked and revolted it, as did the fate of children on the African continent.

This world he built for himself did not enclose the artist in a sealed bubble. On the contrary, he claims the influence of other Cameroonian artists such as JOËL MPAH DOOH and HAKO HANKSON whose finely refined characters are surprisingly spontaneous, but also BASQUIAT whose work has this authenticity that William seeks.

In his more recent paintings such as “Freedom” or “Bororo am”, the artist broadens his project and explores different pictorial approaches while remaining consistent with his universe. We feel him driven by bursts of creativity, by a new happiness in painting despite the difficulties he is facing. Along with his friend Moustapha Baïdi Oumarou, William Bakaïmo is part of this new generation of emerging talents who place Cameroon as one of the leading countries in contemporary art.