No sooner had he left Les Beaux-Adrts than the international artistic scene opened its doors to him. He exposes! in Côte D’Ivoire (his country), in Morocco, in Belgium, in France, in Switzerland; and made several auctions notably at the Drouot Paris hotel, at La Piasa, Bonhams Londres, at Artcurial Marrakech.The artist is on the way to be counted among the “most important figures of Ivorian contemporary painting.
Born on October 28, 1994 in the town of Buyo (in the south-west of the Ivory Coast), Mounou Désiré Ko has always had a clear path in the art world. Passionate about drawing from a very young age, his vocation began very early on when he won a competition when he was still only in elementary school. His school orientation is quite clear. After an artistic baccalaureate at the Abidjan Artistic Education High School (LEA) where he graduated from his promotion, he joined the Fine Arts of the same city to obtain a license.
Mounou Désiré achieves a happy marriage between impressionism and “healing” art. He has armed his own style by pushing the limits of painting with a touch as seductive as it is unpredictable. This is what the artist decided to give a second life to mobile phones users. So he uses keyboards and screens to draw human figures, which he inserts into realistic and colorful urban settings. The resolutely ecological approach is no less aesthetic; o $ rant original reliefs and a completely pleasant look, on the streets of Dakar or the commercial district of Adjamé in Abidjan.
The works of Mounou Désiré Ko have won the hearts of many amateurs, but also of discerning collectors who already foresee the brilliant future that is emerging for the young painter.
From work to work, Mounou’s artistic approach is essentially influenced by his environment. Urban landscapes are its framework par excellence. The painter’s reflection is guided by what they represent. It takes on a modern, dehumanizing world. The moving bodies in these tables are occupied with their own affairs. They don’t communicate, don’t meet. Drowned in the capitalist system, these people are interested only in their means of subsistence and get bogged down in a routine that makes them machines insensitive to those around them. Although it may seem dark, Mounou presents it in a luminous, colorful form, illustrating the ambience and warmth of these spaces teeming with people pressed for time. His point of view is not Manichean. He does not automatically denounce. He notes and opens the debate. The distance between humans grows with the evolution of technology. This evolution is presented with genius by the artist. Like a metonymy, he uses mobile phone keyboards to express the concept of technological evolution.
Composed of keyboards, men are nothing more than machines which gradually and unconsciously lose their part of humanity. As a result, we find ourselves with a society which no longer bothered itself with physical relationships, with real attentions far from the virtual, which takes pleasure in its femme and regulates all these imperatives thanks to digital technology, which lets its opinion be decided. “denies by social media without really caring about the reality outside of this fictitious world in the” nal. The relief applied to Mounou’s paintings therefore has an interest in form but also and especially in the background. Using his keyboards, he brings aesthetic relief to these landscapes, then raises the issues of our time. It offers a technique for recycling electronic waste, a real headache for manufacturers and water for humanity. Resolutely contemporary, wise, and attentive to his time, he is not “ge. Hence the transition between the keyboard and the touch screens that appear in these paintings. These screens that he applies to the feet of his characters like broken glasses, symbol of the double-edged sword of new technologies.
