Le Long Voyage

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix

1 June - 15 July

Le Long Voyage is a snapshot of the young artist’s ongoing internal search for identity. Celebrating familial bonds while questioning its essence, the French artist with Congolese background traces kinship links across various objects and images from personal archives to collective cultural memory. Being a second generation French following his parents’ immigration and feeling confronted with ruptures, Ngoya created a family cosmogony by playing with the space of possibility with the gaps in his family history, with imagined link through the eyes and perspectives of different characters.

The works of Ngoya evoke sense of nostalgia. The deep longing to discern his identify and where he comes from, gives colours to the images, even those found by chance in waste bins on the street. Scenes of foliage, simple image of a hand or a neck, are appropriated by the artist who turns them into a part of a whole, however unfathomable it may be, a large scope of his personal past, making the exhibition something intimate.

A very large panel painting of deep red hue hung from the ceiling oversees the the ground floor installation. The colour makes it hard to decipher what is depicted, where after a while of looking, we notice an outdoor extension of a domestic scene, a man at right, a sort of a large tub on the ground and drapes of fabric- it looks as if the scene has taken place ages ago, removing it out of our directly relevant environment. It is in front of your eyes, yet it is beyond reach. It is so close, yet far. It is, after all, a long journey.

Surrounding this monumental work are smaller paintings, each of which represents a part of the journey, all with Ngoya’s signature transfer of images, and quietly displaying his acute sense of colour.

The basement gallery has dramatic ambiance with a large scale lantern of steel and plexiglass. An endeavour to realise a work that is between painting and sculpture, this ambitious oeuvre dimly lights the gallery mysteriously, where a series of smaller paintings inhabit the cave-like space.

Anthony Ngoya (1995, Limoge)

Lives and works in Amsterdam.

Anthony Ngoya completed L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre in 2020. He now lives and works in Amsterdam in a reputed two-year residency, Des Ateliers. He has participated in numerous group shows especially in Belgium, one of which was a major solo presentation at Horst arts and Music in the summer of 2022. Besides the Horst presentation, Ngoya’s group show participations include Flowers at Room Temperatures, De Studio, Antwerp, 2023, Real/Unreal, The Constant Now, Antwerp, 2022, Currents #8, Marres House for Contemporary Art, Maastricht, 2020,, Under a Flag: Anthony Ngoya and Shao-Jie Lin Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London in 2020, All in one, Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels 2019.