DAKAR, Dakar

Gopal Dagnogo, the whimsical accident of painting

Born in 1973 in Abidjan, Gopal Dagnogo grew up in a family steeped in art and culture: a historian father, a mother who taught visual arts, and two brothers trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan who introduced him to academic drawing. Early on, painting became for him a natural and visceral language—a refuge from voluntary servitude and the absurdity of the adult world. As a teenager, he left Côte d’Ivoire for France, continuing his education in a Philosophy and Visual Arts program in Bordeaux, where the influence of writer Jacques Abeille expanded his artistic horizons beyond the bounds of European academicism into the realm of conceptual art.

From the European Renaissance to Matisse, from Antoni Tàpies to Vincent Van Gogh, Dagnogo draws upon a wide range of influences, yet they all converge in a style of painting where instinct prevails over premeditation and accident becomes a creative opportunity. Rejecting the notion of purely conceptual work, he champions a living, immediate art—one fed by spontaneity and the unpredictable.

An aesthetic of Banality

Heavily influenced by still life, Gopal Dagnogo seeks to restore a poetic, symbolic, and at times biting presence to ordinary objects. 

Through his mixed-media paintings, he pays tribute to the "banality of the everyday" and deeply questions our relationship with the world. Recurring items in his works—Converse sneakers, bottles, Victorian chairs, plates of fruits and vegetables—serve as symbols of a world saturated with contradictions, fragments of memory adrift between wandering and contemporary hope. With these simple motifs, the artist offers a biting social satire, confronting viewers with the paradoxes of modern life: unchecked consumerism, the futile pursuit of happiness through accumulation, lifestyle standardization, and excessive media saturation.

For this exhibition at Galerie OH, Dagnogo takes a distinctly different path, less focused on critique and more oriented toward a contemplative, introspective reading of the world around him. This shift in approach, while remaining true to the core of his practice, reveals a more intimate side of his work.

Dakar and the Medina: a new source of inspiration

Now in residence at Galerie OH, Gopal Dagnogo recently settled in the Medina district. A symbol of resistance, creative vitality, and cultural blending unique to Dakar, this emblematic neighborhood marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of his work. Immersed in this historic district, founded in 1914 after tensions between the French colonial administration and local populations, Dagnogo discovered new aesthetic and symbolic horizons.

Named in reference to the Medina of Arabia to soothe the local populations displaced by the French colonial administration, Dakar’s Medina has since become a vital center of Senegalese artistic creation. It has fostered generations of artists, musicians, photographers, and playwrights who have shaped the city's cultural identity in a vibrant urban space.

From this neighborhood—home to the free studio of Pierre Lods and the early experiments of the Dakar School—Dagnogo draws a renewed energy. This manifests in a rawer materiality in his works, reconnecting with some of his own artistic experiments from the 1990s and resonating with his intuitive approach. The call to prayer, the chants of the Mouride community , and the constant hum of the street infuse his movements, reinforcing the choreographic, almost musical dimension of his painting gesture. The city is no longer just a motif but becomes the subject of the painting itself: to paint Dakar is to adopt its rhythm, its energy, its ruptures, and its contrasts.

A free and living visual language

Gopal Dagnogo embraces a painting style that is free, intuitive, and radically experimental—born of a long-standing rejection of imposed education and echoing the political and artistic history of the Medina. Returning to painting after nearly a decade-long pause, he has adopted acrylic for its quick drying time, flexibility, and dynamic qualities. His works emerge without sketches, often sparked by an initial burst of color around which the composition unfolds in a near-meditative state, akin to automatic drawing.

The surface of his paintings is tumultuous, allowing bright colors and semi-abstract forms, sometimes anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, to coexist in an unstable yet captivating balance. Viewers are invited into a sensory exploration: one can almost smell the scents, hear the murmurs of a city in motion.

A transformed materiality

This encounter with the Medina transforms not just Dagnogo’s themes but also the very materiality of his work. He now favors textured industrial paints, reminiscent of the chipped and colorful facades of the neighborhood. He explores new formats, with installations that invite viewers to move through the space.

The motif of the door — “bunt” in Wolof — emerges as a powerful symbol: a passage, an opening to other worlds, an invitation to both physical and spiritual movement. His work now expands beyond the canvas, incorporating wood panels salvaged from old merchant tables dating from the 1970s and 1980s, which encourage viewers to walk around the pieces, fostering active exploration.

The Medina doesn’t change the artist—it reveals who he has always been: a sensitive observer of human realities, able to transmute the ordinary into visual poetry, blending social critique with an irresistible joy in making.

A new visual alphabet

Fascinated by the graphic elegance of letters, their abstract power, and symbolic weight, Dagnogo often incorporates text fragments into his canvases. In this series, he draws inspiration from verses of the Qur’an, stylizing them to emphasize their visual strength over literal meaning. As an “explorer of signs” and a “choreographer of letters,” he taps into the history of Arabic calligraphy, widely taught in Senegal’s many Quranic schools. His abstract compositions free the letter from its original significance, turning calligraphy into a field of formal experimentation, and a space for reflecting on memory, transmission, and the ambiguity of symbols—always with a subversive edge.

As an artist of the absurd and a humble witness to a turbulent world, Gopal Dagnogo finds in Dakar a living mirror of his own artistic journey—where art is entertainment, the unexpected guides creation, and beauty springs from the present moment. The title of the exhibition, Gueule Tapée – Daradja, echoes this spirit. It evokes both a very real place—Dakar’s Gueule Tapée neighborhood—and a symbolic dimension through the Wolof word daradja, meaning blessing, elevation, and grace.