A second-hand sheep, students from the Republic school, a scene of a father’s farewell, the portrait of a beloved uncle as a citizen of the world, a group of sappers, a mixed couple under the Parisian street lamps, African migrants in “road to paradise”… the artist Francis Essoua tells his story in monumental canvases, radiant and colorful worlds populated by stylized characters, where the motif is king and the imagination leads the dance. Born in 1989 in Cameroon, Francis Essoua, known as Enfant Précoce, arrived in France at the age of nine where he became a dancer, before taking up painting in 2013 through his love for fashion. From the start, his practice was dominated by vibrant colors and ornamental patterns, those that he gleans from his daily life and those that take him back to the fiery tones of his childhood on the Cameroonian coast. Expressing itself first through abstraction, Enfant Précoce quickly turns to the figurative. With a free and generous stroke, he instinctively paints scenes from his imagination. Each one links him to his history, his life in Cameroon, the members of his family, like Malam, his sculptor uncle who introduced him to the world of art, and above all the tales that he can spend hours listening to: the fable of the rainbows announcing the birth of elephants or that of the crocodile Ngondo, the guardian of the forest. This folklore constitutes one of the bases of his pictorial vocabulary, which he enriches with a more contemporary mythology, that of today’s Africa, with its Marabouts and its Ben Skins. Visions which continue to anchor him in his own memories but also carry a social message with which his work is imbued. By retracing with a brush his history and that of his family, Enfant Précoce narrates a collective experience, that of a failing government, a colonial educational system, a migratory path towards France, a tumultuous adaptation, a profession that we do not choose but which allows us to support loved ones who remain in Africa… A social reality that he is in no way keen to show crudely, preferring to suggest it by talking about life, in the manner of the tales he loves so much. His painting is political without being protesting. As a poet of difficult lives, Enfant Précoce expresses his view of contemporary society, “experienced as black and foreign”, through the multicolored light of his palette and his country: “we are a solar people”.
