A lot of my work is linked to theory and Afrofuturism—Sun Ra, for example—but actually showing Black people in my paintings is complicated for me, personally. So I show and hide at the same time.

Not at all. They’re alien or abstract bodies—light bodies. Something I find very interesting about Blackness is that it’s a good reflector.

Well, I have this very clear memory from when I was young—there was a heatwave in Paris and a family friend had on a pink shirt. His skin was super sweaty and it became completely pink because of the shirt’s reflection. His whole body turned pink. He was so fucking beautiful—for me this idea of reflecting and being able to shine is central to what Blackness is. It’s physical but also metaphorical. Black is a color that shines.

Exactly, which moves towards the idea of reappropriation. There’s a big difference between when you appropriate something and when you reappropriate—that’s what I mean by shining too. Even some white people, like David Bowie, for example, made things shine.

Obviously there are limits to this, but culture is something that has to be shared and mixed, open to influences. We’re very lucky to be of a generation where we can be here and still see what’s happening overseas at the same time. There’s also this idea of sampling, which is very Black. Like early Kanye creating entire tapes just through sampling. At some point, it all gets reappropriated and often our generation doesn’t even know where it comes from, but we can discover references this way and then go back to find out the source.

Completely, it’s a revolutionary move. You can take Mozart, or something classical, which is completely white music, but when a Black artist like J Dilla samples it, they take ownership over it. It’s a way of re-owning it.

It’s almost a form of revenge—it’s basically saying, “OK, you’ve taken my culture from me, I’m going to take something back from you. And it’s mine now.”

I do the same in my work, in terms of inventing new shapes. I never want to make a painting that looks like anybody else’s—some people see Francis Bacon in my work, but that’s actually not the reference at all. There is no singular reference. It’s about taking back pieces and using them like samples, making them my own—so taking back from Goya or Guston or Peter Saul or Robert Crumb. Taking back what I didn’t have, you know? It makes me think of André Breton’s cabinet of curiosities, because I know you’ve been looking at surrealism.

As part of the white surrealist movement, Breton had collected all these objects from other cultures—African cultures, Chinese cultures, etcetera—and taken them for his own.

They’re different, they’ve been shifted by the digital, which is not as catchable. I think of digital objects—the computer, the phone—as almost ghost objects, because they show you another reality. If you’re looking at a screen and I’m somewhere else in the room, I don’t see what you’re seeing. The screen is like a portal, and when you go through the portal, you’re getting information, information, information, and then boom. What comes out is influenced by that—it becomes about creating new realities, and sampling.

It’s like a burst.

Caribbean myth is really interesting in this context, because it’s based on the fact that enslaved people couldn’t use their own cultures or practices or religions. They had to mix it with European Christianity, which created a kind of syncretism. And then you look at Candomblé in Brazil, which is the equivalent of Voodoo, and you find the same number of saints, just different names, and they map onto certain African deities. So it’s an adaptation too.

Another sampling. So there’s a long history of sampling as a practice for us. White artists aren’t using this idea as much, because they’re producing a continuation of their own story—which isn’t inherently bad, they just aren’t forced to rework the elements.

Which sometimes is very boring, very bourgeois, sure. What I like, and what is really related to Afrofuturism and also to punk, is to counter this with an instinct to erase. It’s an instinct to trash what exists and make something else. It’s like when there was R&B, then you got hip-hop, but then that was erased by trap, and now drill is coming. It’s erasing to rebuild, to create. But you need that moment of chaos first, and I think Black artists are in that moment now. The issue is this situation can easily become dangerous—if you look at Black figurative painting, for example, it just shows a “Black scene” or “Black image,” but it misses the essence of what we can feel or want to show.

Same recipe, different spice. You’re still segregating. There’s this big gallery in Vienna that’s a great example of why this doesn’t work. When the BLM movement happened, there was a realization that the only Black people working in galleries and museums were cleaners or security guards—which actually is a job my mom had. But anyway, there was nobody who had a voice, who could really make change. So, in Vienna, this major gallerist kicked every single employee out and decided to make a “Black gallery,” where they only hired Black people. And to me, it was like “What’s the point? That doesn’t solve anything.”

Exactly! Why not create a discussion between people—a mix of employees who can actually have a conversation about what’s happening? Otherwise it just feels like this weird quota that needs to be met.

Make a new hero! A new mythology. They say human beings are the only species that needs myth, that creates myth. Myths are what allow us to grow and become more aware. So, we need a new story or a real myth from Africa—not some dumb Hollywood version like “Black Panther,” which I couldn’t even finish. We need basic fables, like La Fontaine’s fables in France, but then we also need heroes we can aspire to. Recognizing yourself in mass media characters is great, sure, but it’s not enough if it doesn’t come from a Black perspective. Like why not make a film about Yasuke, who was a Black samurai in the 1500s.

Right. I love “Blade,” for example, and in that there are traditional white vampires, but they’re being fought by Blade, who has a whole new vibe—super nice style with the leather jacket, the sword, etcetera. It’s a real twist.

Yes, and this stamp at some point becomes branding. I thought about this when I went to Art Basel Miami a few years ago. There was this huge hype around Black figurative painting, right? When I got there, I was focused on setting up my booth—I didn’t look at anything else, just installed my show, which, by the way, had no Black people in the paintings. None. Because I didn’t feel the need to do that. But when I finished and looked around, I saw that all the other booths were full of huge figures of Black people—Black bodies and faces. And when I saw that, I had this shocking realization: the art fair becomes a market. It was a market in the South still selling Black people. At first I thought, “Well, but it’s helping Black people create, giving them money, etcetera,” but then the more I looked around, the more I realized it was only white people selling this work. They were still benefiting. For me, there’s always this back and forth—I never really know how to feel about the Black figurative movement.

Exactly—there’s no epiphany or transcendence, which is essential. Simply presenting Black bodies in this way, to me, feels like those early colonial photographs that were used as advertisements in Europe, to show Africa and the people there. Very anatomical images of bodies. I think more artists should be on this surrealism vibe you’re talking about, precisely because it lets you move past this white point of view that can really kill a work. Show me the inside of your brain, you know?

We do. Black figuration started with Kerry James Marshall. Then you had Noah Davis, all those artists and boom, Black figurative painting was branded. Okay, let’s find somebody that can do that for New Black Surrealism, which can be a kind of reunion, a making of a generation and a history.

It makes people more comfortable, because it’s a way of understanding why you’re saying certain things.

And really, where you grew up, what your personal lived experiences are, those things are all way more important to who you are than your race and religion. It makes me think of this movie I really love, “Candyman.” Not the Jordan Peele one, the older one. It was inspired by a Clive Barker novel about an interracial couple—the Black guy gets killed and is reincarnated into this body made of bees. He becomes a swarm. I love that idea, because a swarm has no shape, no color, no gender. It’s one body, but hundreds of bodies at the same time. I think about this a lot in my work as a way to resist the idea of the “Black body”—finding a shape that is unshaped, that can grow and move. It’s very related to Black surrealism, in that way.

Focusing on identity segregates so quickly. It’s a trap. We’re trapping ourselves in these small things when the experience of humanity and the soul is so much more. I want to show you violence with some pleasure, for example. It’s that simple and that universal. If I want to show you a flower, I can show you a flower the way I see it. Maybe my past history or trauma informs how I, in particular, see that flower, which changes how I paint it—it might make it a more powerful painting. But the painting itself isn’t about that trauma. It’s about conveying this image and moment that is interesting to me. When I paint people, or ghosts, for example, sometimes I include violence—but actually, in my work, mostly nothing is “happening,” exactly. It’s people in spaces of color. That’s what I’m drawn to: the colors of a room, the situation. It’s not premeditated. People always want to read into things, to point out that an artist must have put a line there for this reason or a color here for that reason. But painting is never that mathematical, logical. It can take months in my mind to think about a painting and then when it comes to confronting the canvas sometimes it never even works. In my mind it’s perfect, but then I have to grapple with the fact that I’m dealing with a physical object. It can never be the vision in my head. My most beautiful painting will never exist.

It is freeing, yes. And it can never go according to plan because it depends on the smallest things: your mood, what you ate, what you drank, how many cigarettes you smoked. Sometimes I just smoke cigarettes in front of a canvas for hours because I’m scared to start. I fail and fail and fail, but finally it all works because of that failure, because of how scared I was to do it for so many days. The mistakes are what make it work.

Mystic mistakes. Yes, like it’s coming to you from another world.

It does feel like channeling, yes. You never know when something good is going to come. It’s like looking for the blue notes in jazz—everything shifts and then starts to take shape. You have to try to attract it. You have to be open to it, always.