Je suis un Rebelle, 1999
signed and dated 'Chéri Samba/1999' (lower right)
acrylic and glitter on canvas
114 x 145cm (44 7/8 x 57 1/16in).
(unframed)

Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired from the artist by the current owner, 2007;
A private collection.

The writing to the lower left translates to:

I am a rebel It's curious to see that most humans' hearths are on the left side. May be they are weak or corrupted. Few people' hearths are on the right side. May be they are messiah. Mine is nor on the right, not on the left, even not centered. I am a rebel. Remember Turkia, Chili, Rwanda in 1994... ?

Resonating artists oeuvre, the current work displays the exorbitant and critical qualities that are the defining elements of Cheri Sambas work. Motivated to depict the socio-political issues faced in his home country of the Democratic Republic of Congo from the 1980's, Samba often presents self portraits such as this one, contextualising himself in his position of his societal constraints.

Having begun his career in illustrating advertisements Mbuta-Masunda Studio, before setting up his own artist's studio, graphic text would continue to play a significant role to the artist's work as a display of social and political narratives. This motif would contribute to his defining style that would be coined as Zairian Popular Paining. The purpose of text and speech bubbles within his work was to enable a level of accessibility for the viewer, heightening their sense of relatability.

"I had noticed that people in the street would walk by paintings, glance at them and keep going. I thought that if I added a bit of text, people would have to stop and take time to read it, to get more into the painting and admire it. That's what I called the 'Samba signature'." (Cheri Samba)

In regards to the present lot, Je suis un Rebelle, Cheri Samba remarked that he "wanted to remind people that so far nothing has changed. You still have the dominated and the dominant. We pretend to fight terrorism, but it's still there. Rebels are traitors who manipulate and harm people. It is basically a power struggle and I'm not only talking about Congo. I had a problem once, because of a painting where somebody thought I had portrayed them. So they hassled me. Although I am not the type of rebel I just described, I chose to use myself as a model to avoid running the same risk again."

Bibliography
A. Magnin, ed., J'aime Cheri Samba, (Paris, 2004), pp.11-15, 104.

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