Critics in Kinshasa have never accepted the phrases in my paintings, they think of painting in a more western manner. Yet the truth, in my paintings, is almost always expressed in the sentences inserted in the paintings. Often they contradict the scene represented…for example, for a person from Zaire, nudity is scandalous: I paint it, I make it visible, and then, with a phrase, I find a way of saying ‘don’t look’. I like these paradoxes. -Chéri Samba