Galerie Mikael Andersen is proud to present the work of Aboudia for the very first time in Germany. The artist from Abudjan was born 1983 and is noted for his large-scale, heavily layered, brutally energetic paintings that combine an innocence and spontaneity with the portrayal of a dark interior world. His urban landscapes are haunted by armed soldiers, ominous skulls and a populace hemmed in by violence and danger. 

The eye is caught by the multilayered paintings and we become aware of the vivid, brutal pageant of contemporary Africa weaving before us like a fabric of consciousness - soldiers, skulls, African fetishes, flashes of street life - expressed with a naiv vitality.

“Painting is my drug”, he says.  By showing claustrophobic and oppressive, his work achieves a careful balance between pathos and aggression. While the vitality of his style recalls Basquiat, the darker undercurrents and themes describe a battlefield straight out of Goya. His expression of revolt and explosive, incendiary life in his everyday urban environment brings to mind artists from the great American tradition, just like Twombly or Dubuffet.

The surfaces of his work deploy fragments, cuttings, from bits of comic strips, magazine ads, newspaper images, set into the paintings' overall compositions so as to suggest current events cohering through the imagination into a troubled and troubling vision. In the end though, the artist's gift of cohesion transforms chaos into vitality, painful events to esthetic redemption, so one is able to see the whole as a changeable tide forever renewing hope.

Joël Andrianomearisoa was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1977. He lives and works between Antananarivo and Paris. Andrianomearisoa says of his work: "The only thing that matters to me is to deal with time. And what frightens me most is never to be on time, to be outdated. My way of answering this challenge is to be permanently against the current". In his ‘dealing with time’ Andrianomearisoa falls into no clear category. But his works in paper and textile are most indicative of his larger interests. Black features prominently, especially in his textile works, which hover enticingly between the ephemeral and the permanent. These works are partly sculptured and partly left to the chance and serendipity of the material with which he works.

Andrianomearisoa has participated in a number of group shows, including Africa Remix and Africa Now!