Libasse KA’s paintings provide creative solutions Painting issues. Starting from 2025, taking an untitled canvas that includes a dark outline of an umbrella, Ka paints a piece on the newspaper and presses it on the surface of his canvas, transfers the image to the newspaper, and throws the newspaper away. When I visited the Brussels studio, he explained that he drew an umbrella directly on the canvas.
KA’s works present a faint surface, mostly abstract, despite the oscillation between free gestures and recognizable forms – umbrellas, cars, silhouettes of hammers, etc. They vary in size, with recent works leaning towards larger canvases.
KA’s unconventional approach directly opposed his training. He moved to Belgium from Senegal in 2010 and briefly admitted to school in 2019 – l’écolenational esupérieureuredes Arts Arts Visuals de la Cambre. But he left in just a few months, frustrated by his rigid conservatism.
Then, in 2023, his career took an unexpected turn as he worked in an electronics store, where he met Colombian artist Oscar Murillo. Murillo immediately realized his talent from the images of the young artist’s paintings displayed on his cell phone and provided him with a allowance for painting full-time, allowing him to quit his electronic job and hone his practice. This connection led to KA reaching Vanessa Carlos, the founder of London Carlos/Ishikawa Gallery, who soon began to represent him.
Soon, KA was on display internationally, and last October in Paris, Carlos/Ishikawa gave him a solo booth. This year, his first institutional solo will be open at the Dhondt-Dhaenens Museum in Belgium.
libasse ka: Untitled2024.
Photo by Damian Griffiths/©Libasse KA/Carlos/Ishikawa, London
When I visited the Patrial Apartments in KA, Brussels, I noticed paintings and art books scattered across every surface. When he talks about influence, he hesitates on my notes. “I don’t want to look like a derivative,” he admits. While there may be echoes of Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Sigmar Polke, KA’s paintings are more important than the sum of their constitutive parts: they are chaotic and fertile spaces where new and unexpected things emerge.
His studio is filled with large canvases, dominated by grey and beige shadows. Despite the limited palettes, they each contain a lot of markers and textures. Ka signaled toward the sticky, yellowed spots on a painting and said, “This is the varnish,” inviting me to touch it. I could hardly control my excitement when I held his work in my hand: his obvious tactile painting was begging to be moved.
A series of drawings scattered across his floor provide further insight into his thoughts. A sketch depicts a knight driving a spear through the dragon while a small photographer lurks on the edge. “It changes the way you see it, right?” ka smiled. “Suddenly, it was not only a battle, but a movie.” There was this subtle destruction of view in his paintings. There, Ka cleverly responds to the camera’s omniscience in modern life, imposing something both rough and organized, which contrasts with the smooth reels of social media feed.
