BOB NOSA

SIMPLY HUMAN

One day, anger came to him. Like the color that comes out of the tube, powerful and pasty, the certainty that the canvas is not there to look pretty, but that it affirms, that it defends, that it rebels, when the world around becomes unbearable. It’s not really going well, he keeps repeating in his acrylics, ringing with sounds and rictus. And the paintings are as much a refusal, in the face of corruption, police abuses and this schizophrenia of power. Bob-nosa speaks of Nigeria? Certainly, but does it concern only this country? To the north, to the south, in this large planetary surface, which lets go, the eyes turned on the other side.

The reason is obviously his brutal treatment of the theme. The gesture is not burdened with any precaution. It goes to the most raw of reality. But the speech, its positions are above all in total coherence with the pictorial speech. One of his exhibition partners said, “I love his power. I love him because he’s real. (…) I love him because he believes that with art, we can change something in our world. Nosa wants to help people on the street. He is against violence. He wants us to help people who have problems, people who are in hospitals, and that’s very important because he has vision.”

This commitment will be the primary reason for this collaboration with the Granada Gateway. Now, it was still necessary to find the medium best suited to the painter’s purpose. When it stays hung in a gallery or on the wall of a living room, a canvas concerns only a necessarily reduced public. It’s between four walls. And it is also the conviction of the gallery that seeks to popularize messages and plastic beauty, opening them to other audiences and more important spaces. The street offers a completely different perspective.

In this first production, Bob-Nosa suggested the idea of a t-shirt, in addition to paintings and prints on plexiglas. This time, hundreds of people will carry the message. They do it because the painting is beautiful, violent, crying out for truth, grimacing and committed. They do so because it shows their support for the most disadvantaged, the child, the victim… whatever its colour, whatever its nationality and gender. Bob-Nosa is not only Nigerian. Simply human.