Bly/Stay

Ydi is an full-time artist with painting as main discipline.

Interests: Oil technique, art history, theology, Africa

“I believe beauty can be subversive when it exposes what we value and what we consider ugly. Painting is an exciting and conceptual medium to me because it plays on traditional notions of value and ‘high art’ and has a heritage oscillating between ‘complacency with the status quo’ on the one hand and ‘subversion of it’ on the other (for example Reformation art and Romanticism). Re-imagining oil painting in the Sub-Saharan Africa context demonstrates how figurative painting remains a dynamic and thriving discipline, able to question, destabilize and contemplate culture and what it means to be human.

My studio process involves stitching together and editing photographic sources, drawing, stencilling, masking, scumbling, dry brush, glazing and sometimes using gold leaf. Artists I admire include Edgar Degas, Andrew Wyeth, Antonio Lopez Garcia, Andries Gouws and Adriaan van Zyl. My aim is to paint thoughtful, complex pieces which resist the cultural reductionism I often see in the art world and world today.”