LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery is pleased to start 2026 with “World of Wonders”, a duo show bringing together the works of Prince Obasi and Dramane Toloba. Through this dialogue, the Gallery explores childhood as a sensitive, intimate, and universal territory—one shaped by memory, transmission, and becoming.
World of Wonder opens onto a territory where childhood appears as a space of innocence and carefreeness, but also of quiet, unspoken promises. Far from being merely a stage of life, childhood is revealed here as a world in itself: an inner place where ways of seeing, gestures, and modes of being in the world are formed.
Winged cherubs, mischievous cupids, the Christ child of Nativity scenes or royal children in court portraits—the figure of the child has long been an omnipresent subject in the visual arts. On the African continent, childhood naturally inscribes itself within a reflection on transmission. It connects generations, carries memory, and simultaneously sketches the contours of what is yet to come.
From Moroccan artist Anuar Khalifi, a portraitist of turbulent young figures, to South African artist Nelson Makamo, whose work is deeply inspired by the innocence of young lives in rural areas of his country, many contemporary African artists continue to cherish this figure for its expressive power. Thus, scenes of childhood—long associated with joy and lightness—take on a more lucid reading. They emerge on cardboard, a fragile material closely tied to the street and precarious neighbourhoods in the work of Armand Boua, or smile broadly in Aboudia’s paintings while their gazes bear the marks of an unstable world. Everywhere, childhood remains a sensitive space of projection, at once play, presence, and awareness of the world.
It is within this lineage that the works of Dramane Toloba and Prince Obasi take their place in World of Wonders. Both artists cast an attentive gaze on the ordinary scenes of life, where childhood unfolds through play, simple gestures, and the protective presence of the mother.
Toloba composes his scenes from fragments of fabric assembled on the canvas, animated by paper clips that mark connection and attachment in the artist’s practice. This recomposed material evokes a sensitive memory made of layered narratives, transmitted gestures, and worlds stitched together. His luminous canvases allow a gentle nostalgia to surface: memories of fireside tales, shared riddles, races among friends, and collective games. They suggest the gradual disappearance of these moments of joy and transmission, replaced by quieter forms of solitude. His figures carry within them the warmth of these past moments.
In Obasi’s work, childhood reveals itself through the delicacy of shared moments. The scenes he presents are bathed in a calm light, where maternal love, play, and everyday care shape spaces of protection. Revisiting the bourgeois family portrait, the artist introduces a renewed sensitivity that is both intimate and universal. The child appears as a fully present being, rooted in a world still inhabited by wonder.
By entering into dialogue within World of Wonders, the works of these two artists invite us to reconsider childhood not as a distant memory, but as a way of inhabiting the present. A world of wonders—fragile and essential—where perhaps what is most true within us finds shelter.
Echoing the themes of the exhibition, a portion of the proceeds from the sales will be donated to the Association Imagine le Monde, which supports education and inclusion for children and young people in vulnerable situations in Côte d’Ivoire.
