In Paris, Congolese artist Thierry B presents Lisapo: Once Upon a Story, a vibrant exhibition where painting becomes language. Through memory, transmission, and identity, he invites the public to listen to the colorful voice of a living, urban Africa.
Thierry B tells Africa through color: “Lisapo, Once Upon a Story” comes to Paris
Paris, November 2025. The Centre Paris Anim’ Simon Le Franc, nestled just steps away from the Centre Pompidou, is hosting a singular exhibition: “Lisapo – Once Upon a Story”, from November 19 to December 19. Through a series of powerful canvases, Congolese artist Thierry B transforms memory into color and speech into image. His work draws inspiration from African oral traditions to recount, in his own way, the journey of Afro-descendants between roots and modernity.
The word Lisapo comes from Lingala and means story. It is a key term in Congolese culture, tied to storytelling and words passed down at dusk, where the wisdom of elders meets the imagination of children. Thierry B reinvents this tradition through a pictorial language that is both contemporary and deeply rooted in urban Africa. His canvases vibrate with color, hybrid figures, nods to pop culture, and references to everyday life. They are at once fragments of memory and mirrors of the present.
Born in Brazzaville and based in Paris since the 1990s, Thierry B has established himself as a singular voice within the Afro-contemporary art scene. Self-taught, he paints memory, connection, and dignity. His works, situated between figuration and storytelling, portray Africa as a space of life, energy, and transmission.
With Lisapo, he continues a reflection already initiated in previous exhibitions (Résonnances, The Black Shore). Here, the canvas becomes a page of living history. The faces he paints are not portraits but presences: ancestors, travelers, dreamers, powerful women. The artist blends the codes of comics, collage, and muralism to recreate the rhythm of African speech. Like in a folktale, each scene opens onto another, each character seems to be waiting to be heard.
“For me, painting is storytelling. It is about keeping alive the voices of those we no longer hear,” explains Thierry B. His visual universe echoes that of the griots: it transmits, connects, teaches. Painting becomes a territory of memory and connection, a bridge between Brazzaville and Paris, between past and future.
The opening night on Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 6:30 PM promises to be a true moment of sharing. In addition to the presentation of Thierry B’s works, the public will witness a performance by Congolese storyteller Murielle Keto, who will offer a live Lisapo session. Her voice, carried by the musicality of Lingala and the power of African oral expression, will accompany the artist’s canvases.
The event will thus bring together painting, speech, and memory, reconnecting with the primary function of African art: telling the world.
This performative dimension is far from incidental. For Thierry B, art is first and foremost a conversation. “When you look at a painting, you should be able to hear the voice living inside it,” he says. Murielle Keto embodies that voice. Together, they create a space of communion: that of shared storytelling, of dialogue between painting and speech.
The canvases exhibited at Simon Le Franc form a mosaic of stories. We encounter street scenes, couples, musicians, political figures, market vendors, mothers, and children. All of it unfolds within a dense visual universe, saturated with color and energy.
Each painting is a microcosm, a “small world” where the grand theater of contemporary African life is replayed. Thierry B’s style oscillates between symbolic realism and poetic abstraction.
His compositions, often fragmented, recall the urban murals of Kinshasa or Brazzaville, but also the collages of Romare Bearden and the pictorial narratives of Chéri Samba.
Behind the visual beauty lies a deeper reflection. The works question the place of the Black body within modernity, the tension between memory and forgetting, and the survival of traditions within the global city.
“I want to show that our stories are not frozen,” he says. “They move, they transform. Africa is not a past; it is a movement.”
Thierry B’s visual writing draws from an Afro-urban aesthetic. Graffiti, street signs, and popular Congolese typography all find their place within his compositions. The artist paints the way one speaks or sings: rhythmically, energetically, without hierarchy between subjects.
It is this free and intuitive approach that gives his work its strength.
His canvases function both as archives of everyday life and as poetic visions. They express a plural Africa, at once traditional and contemporary, spiritual and political.
The viewer is invited to lose themselves within them, to recognize fragments of themselves, to listen to what color is saying. Every detail matters: a word, a gaze, a pattern, a silence.
For Thierry B, painting is not decorative — it is dialogic. It calls for a response.
The Lisapo project is part of a broader continuity: that of the African narrative as a space of transmission. By adopting the structure of storytelling (beginning, tension, moral) and applying it to the pictorial medium, the artist renews the way Africa is narrated. There is in his work a clear awareness of the creator’s responsibility: to speak without betraying, to show without freezing, to express without simplifying.
Through her presence at the opening night, Murielle Keto highlights this very dimension. Her oral performance will restore to the word “Lisapo” all of its ritual power: that of speech that circulates, connects, and heals.
The dialogue between the artist and the storyteller thus becomes the beating heart of the exhibition. Lisapo – Once Upon a Story is more than an exhibition: it is a sensory and memorial experience.
It speaks both to lovers of contemporary art and to those interested in African traditions and the question of storytelling. In a Paris where Afro-descendant creativity is gaining greater visibility, Thierry B and Murielle Keto remind us that Africa is not simply contemplated — it is listened to.
From November 19 to December 19, 2025, the Centre Paris Anim’ Simon Le Franc (9 rue Simon Le Franc, 75004 Paris) becomes the stage for this encounter between painting and speech.
The exhibition is open to all, and the opening night on November 20 at 6:30 PM promises a rare moment of sharing, between art, memory, and emotion.
Lisapo – Once Upon a Story
Painting exhibition by Thierry B
From November 19 to December 19, 2025
Opening night: Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 6:30 PM
With the exceptional participation of Murielle Keto, Congolese storyteller
Venue: Centre Paris Anim’ Simon Le Franc – 9 rue Simon Le Franc, 75004 Paris
Free admission – Info: +33 1 44 78 20 75
