BethelAniak'Art
About — Biography

A self-made painter of matter.

Born in Lomé in 1969, self-taught, and stubborn about it — Bethel Aniakou's path runs from a chance encounter in a Lomé studio to gallery walls in Paris, Seoul, Tokyo and Washington, D.C.

Bethel Aniakou in his studio, painting a circular composition

Bethel Aniakou in his studio, working on a circular composition. Photograph from the artist's archive.

Bethel Aniakou grew up fascinated by nature, and by his own account was always the child most absorbed in drawing at school. When his formal schooling came to an early end, painting was the one path that felt inevitable. His true initiation began around 1988–1990, when he met the painter Sokeh Edorh in Lomé, who opened his studio to the young artist. "I entered into painting," Bethel has said, "the way one enters into religion."

He went on to take courses at the Artistik centre in Lomé, then studied with Kossi Assou and Adjonou at Lomé's American school, working for a time in a figurative style. In search of other perspectives, he spent months in Ghana, exchanging with artists outside Togo before returning home determined to build a name for himself in abstraction — a far less traveled road at the time in West African painting.

The turn paid off. In 1994 he won first prize in a national competition with a canvas titled Dans les ténèbres la lumière luit ("In the darkness the light shines"), and showed that same year at the Festival Ewolé in Lomé. From there, the exhibitions did not stop: Grand Bassam's Festival des Arts de la Rue in Côte d'Ivoire in 1997, Allad'Art in Benin the same year, a exhibition at Togo's National Assembly in 2000, and a touring itinerary that eventually reached Seoul, South Korea, during the 2002 World Cup.

A painter of matter

Ask Bethel what he paints with, and the list runs well past pigment: wood, bolts, cowrie shells, cardboard, jute sacking, ash and dust, torn paper, fragments of handwriting. "I use whatever I find," he explains, "I put life into it." He calls himself, plainly, un peintre de la matière — a painter of matter — and traces his use of wood back to a family line of carpenters, a material inheritance as much as an aesthetic one.

His surfaces carry scripture-like passages of scratched or painted script, half-legible, alongside collaged newsprint and found text — devices that turn each canvas into something between a painting and a document. It is a language he has carried from small solo shows in Lomé and Istres, France, to "Instinct of Desire," his 2012 solo exhibition at the Parish Gallery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., reviewed in The Washington Post for its patchwork compositions and thick, earth-toned impasto.

Timeline

  • 1969Born in Lomé, Togo.
  • 1988–90Meets painter Sokeh Edorh; studies at the Artistik centre and with Kossi Assou and Adjonou; time in Ghana developing a figurative practice.
  • 1990Returns to Lomé and commits to abstraction as his mode of expression.
  • 1994Wins first prize in a national competition; exhibits at Festival Ewolé 94, Lomé.
  • 1997Shows at the Festival des Arts de la Rue, Grand Bassam (Côte d'Ivoire), and at Allad'Art 97 in Benin.
  • 2000Exhibition at Togo's National Assembly.
  • 2001La Force Tranquille shown in the group exhibition "African Art" in Japan.
  • 2002International tour concludes in Seoul, South Korea, during the World Cup.
  • 2003Fourth solo appearance in Europe; exhibits and lectures at the Théâtre de l'Olivier, Istres, France.
  • 2012"Instinct of Desire," solo exhibition, Parish Gallery, Georgetown, Washington, D.C. — reviewed in The Washington Post.
  • TodayContinues to paint and exhibit between Togo, France and the United States.