Les collines de l’espoir presents a poetic space imbued with change. Between the dancing lines of urban disorder and the ochre notes of sunflowers - harbingers of happy horizons - birds fly off in pursuit of a renewed freedom.
Over the last few years, the art of Salifou Lindou focussed on the topics of exile and politics, praising the resilience of families in the context of financial embezzlement and the decay of community infrastructures. To answer to the recurring electricity and water cuts and the malfunctioning of phone lines in Cameroon, Lindou draws the prospect of a sweeter and carefree life in which these issues would only be a distant memory.
Les collines de l’espoir presents a poetic space imbued with change. Between the dancing lines of urban disorder and the ochre notes of sunflowers - harbingers of happy horizons - birds fly off in pursuit of a renewed freedom.
Lindou takes his inspiration from the hills running through his hometown, emphasising their undulating shape when cars weave their way between makeshift dwellings. The ballet of houses stuck together along the hilly anatomy of the region structures the composition of his works. The red colour of the earth characteristic of western Cameroon initially gave its name to the series it inspired (Les collines rouges, 2018-2023) and now provides the canvases with its substance, used by the artist as a pigment. The cracks formed on the surface of the canvas suggest the fragility and ancestral nature of the earth and recall the physical and psychic links that unite humans with nature.
