The contemporary painter Casimir Balibié Bationo [CasziB.] is originally from the Lélé Tribe in Center-West Burkina Faso and was born in Adjamé (Ivory Coast) in 1982. He now works and lives in Ouagadougou.  After immersing himself in the worlds of painting, life drawings, photography, lighting and motion pictures, he then formally attended a 3 year training in contemporary painting, acquiring crucial techniques to perfect his art and unique style.  Having lived in Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Morocco, and traveled multiple times in Europe, the United States and South America for exhibitions, CasziB. has gathered a wealth of knowledge, insights and inspirations for his art. Indeed, his unending creativity and prolific imagination feed on his constant exposure to different people, cultures, struggles, arts and intellectual concepts encountered throughout his nomadic life. His painting, like life, is universal and always in motion, deeply embedded in the actuality. Via colorful tones and rhythms, faces made of shadows, blurs and contrasts, CasziB. expresses his vision of an Africa in action strengthened by its values and shadowed by the western cultural background. He paints the clashing and the crossing of those cultures.  Discovering CasziB.'s painting is like going through the stories and imagining the destinies of these faces with piercing eyes that challenge you to venture on this haunting journey and at the same time full of grace, full of delicacy. CasziB. is a painter of the "sensitive", the references to which he appeals are intimate and current but also totally universal and tell the story of all: the relationship of man to nature, to others and to his emotions, racism, love, homelessness, migration, human rights, social struggles, family, environment... The images and subjects of his paintings appear in a constant agitation, in a movement of blurs and colors in profusion as if the dreams of a lifetime were taking shape here and now in an immediate, obvious form. The paintings of CasziB., deeply singular, allow multiple journeys, endless discoveries. To accept the invitation of the artist to a crossing between these faces, is to accept to launch out in a voyage which raises interrogations but which also triggers desires of meetings, where the hardness is confronted with the beautiful and where the delicate triumphs over the violent.

Visit Casimir Bationo’s Website at https://www.casimirbationo.com/.