Born on October 29, 1954, in Gabon, Kassa embodies the artist at the crossroads of worlds. A frequent exhibitor at UNESCO, he first left Gabon in 1975, driven by a passion for history and philosophy. He left Gabon for Senegal to study sociology in Dakar, where he immersed himself in the intellectual ferment of the Senegalese capital. A pivotal encounter with Jacques Césaire, the journalist and son of the poet Aimé Césaire, led him toward a career in journalism. This new path took him to Paris, where he attended the École Supérieure de Journalisme and contributed to publications including Transafrique and Francophonie Magazine from 1988 to 1993.
In 1980, Kassa settled in France. He married Françoise and became father to a daughter, weaving the first threads of a cultural and familial métissage that would mark both his life and his work. He has not returned to Gabon in over forty years. This is the engine of everything you see in his work — the earth tones that recur throughout, burnt sienna, ochre, the red of laterite soil, are the colors of a homeland that exists now only in memory. He carries Gabon in his body, but he cannot touch it.
In 1994, at forty, a crisis of conscience drove him to break with journalism. Language had been his tool; now it was insufficient. What he needed to say could not be written. It had to be made visible. It was at this turning point that painting imposed itself on him, revealed through the caring gaze of Françoise, who, seeing him paint, encouraged him to follow this path.
His traditional name, "Kassa," means "to scratch" in Bapounou, a Gabonese dialect — to scratch as one does when something itches, irritates, pushes you outside your comfort zone, forcing you to seek, to know, to understand. The heavy impasto, the scraped surfaces, the layers built up and excavated — these are the physical manifestation of his name's meaning.
Based in Poitiers, Kassa has devoted himself to painting for thirty years. Women are his anchors and initiators. Françoise, who saw the painter in him before he saw it himself. Maïmouna, another totemic woman whose presence opened new paths. They appear not as subjects but as forces — spiritual companions. The red lip that persists across his monochromes is their totem: voice, sensuality, origin, insistence. The feminine principle that survives when everything else is stripped away.
The grids that fragment his figures evoke colonial bureaucracies, immigration paperwork, every institution that imposes form on the self — yet they also provide the scaffolding within which identity gets built. Faces are multiplied, cut, reassembled — not broken, but expanded. Each painting is an act of reconstruction, and reconstruction is not the same as recovery. It is making something that did not exist before. Fragmentation is not death; it is multiplication.
These paintings do not shout. They echo. They do not explain. They insist. They do not end. They open.
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