Rakajoo
Blond
Acrylic and oil on canvas
190 x 145 cm
2021
Courtesy of the artist and Danyz Gallery

Winner of the 2022 Prize of the Friends of the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, Rakajoo is a self-taught French artist born in 1986 who is committed to using art as an escape and as a powerful tool to tell stories. A boxing champion, and an animation designer as well, Rakajoo captures the identities and the complexities of his models and renders them in his paintings using acrylic and oil. The artist plays with perspective to better capture the gaze of his subjects and draw the viewers into the works whilst infusing in his practice variations that combine the codes of comics and animation movies to create a world endowed with its own graphic coherence and weave stronger stories. 

Rakajoo’s work is a contemporary and more inclusive take on Modernist subject-matters. Blond, created in 2021 was first exhibited in his debut solo exhibition titled “Trois Châteaux”. Through the entire body of work, the artist brilliantly documented and depicted twenty-first century life in some of the most mythical and multicultural neighborhoods of Paris which bear the name “château” (in English “castle”), relaying an authentic and personal account of the places where he grew up, normalizing the presence of Black bodies in these spaces (whether indoors or outdoors) and legitimizing their contributions to these communities and society overall. 

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