Question the Answer, Aboudia’s first solo exhibition in the gallery, presents paintings that combine a naive innocence and spontaneity with war, conflict and glimpses into a sinister inner world.

The paintings draw inspiration from the graffiti of Abidjan’s impoverished suburbs. The artist also finds influences in American pop music; using fragments and clippings from comic strips, advertisements and newspapers he gives give the works an almost violent energy.

The motifs in Aboudia’s works, poised between pathos and aggression, are often claustrophobic and unsettling. Armed soldiers and silent, unnerving figures of children haunt his urban landscapes. They refer not only to current political and social issues but also to a disquieting otherworldly place populated by menacing skulls and occult fetishes.

But still there is hope in Aboudia’s paintings; the at once mysterious and explicit motifs transform chaos into vitality and pain into aesthetic redemption. The paintings seek to constantly restore a movable hope, even in the midst of despair.

Aboudia was born in 1983. He lives and works in Abidjan, the largest city in the Ivory Coast, where armed conflict after the presidential elections in 2010-2011 made a lasting impression on his art.

In the spring of 2014 Aboudia exhibited at Galerie Mikael Andersen in Berlin and later the same year he was part of the exhibition Pangaea: New Art from Africa And Latin America at Saatchi Gallery in London. Question the Answer is his first exhibition in Denmark.

Photo credits: Jan Søndergaard