"Color is a power which directly influences the soul"
- Prosper Aluu
LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery is pleased to present Fragments of Knowledge, the first solo exhibition of Nigerian artist Prosper Aluu, on view from March 26 to May 9, 2026. Bringing together several series of paintings as well as an installation created during the artist’s residency in Côte d’Ivoire, the exhibition offers a sensitive reflection on the different ways knowledge is transmitted within contemporary societies.
From this perspective, the artist does not view education as a stable or strictly institutional system; rather, he approaches it as a fragmentary experience, shaped by human relationships, social environments, and the realities of everyday life
As such, the exhibition moves through different spaces of learning: the family, the street, the community, and the classroom. These scenes—sometimes intimate, sometimes collective—reveal the multiple forms of knowledge transmission, ranging from ordinary gestures and lived experiences to formal educational systems. Here, learning appears less as an acquired state than as a continuous process, shaped by social expectations, uncertainties, and aspirations.
This reflection is also expressed through the artist’s visual language. Prosper’s practice revolves around a technique he calls Abfillage, a visual language that combines figurative painting, abstraction and collage. Figures emerge from surfaces composed of fragments of newspapers and printed images, transforming bodies into living archives where personal narratives intersect with collective histories. These materials, drawn from the press and the circulation of information, remind us that knowledge is also constructed through public discourse and the social realities that shapes our lives.
In these scenes of learning, another element stands out for its subtlety: the absence of screens. The characters move through a world where knowledge still circulates through books, paper, speech, and the presence of bodies. By privileging these tangible supports, the artist emphasizes the slow and attentive dimension of learning, reminding us that knowledge is also rooted in the materiality of words, in the repeated gestures of reading, and in the shared time between those who transmit knowledge and those who learn.
At the heart of these compositions appear portraits of people the artist has encountered or lived alongside throughout his journey. Above their heads appears a small golden crown, a recurring motif in his work that grants these figures a form of symbolic nobility and affirms the dignity of those who, often invisibly, sustain the transmission of knowledge. The bodies—deliberately disproportionate, with elongated silhouettes and reduced heads—also constitute a visual signature of the artist. By disrupting the usual hierarchy of portraiture, Prosper shifts the viewer’s attention and invites us to consider the body as a whole—a place of experience, memory, and learning.
This exploration of visible and invisible forms of knowledge thus extends into the exhibition space. As part of his residency in Côte d'Ivoire to prepare for the exhibition, the artist developed an installation entitled The Weight of Knowledge. This life-size sculpture, a metaphor for the social and intellectual expectations that accompany access to education, depicts a student carrying a stack of books stretching as far as the eye can see. Made up of newspapers covered in resin and pages filled with students' own reflections on education and their expectations, these books become fragments of collective memory.
The creation of this installation also led to a collaboration with two students from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Lydia Matiégou-Keita and Chahid El Batti, who came to complete their final year internship with the artist. Their participation is fully in line with the exhibition's theme, where the transmission of knowledge is experienced as much in the acts of creation as in the exchanges between generations.
Through Fragments of Knowledge, Prosper shares his vision of education and the realities it encompasses. The artist explores the hopes it inspires, as well as the social pressures, family expectations, and inequalities that accompany it. Learning appears here as a trajectory that is both personal and collective, shaped by the responsibilities, ambitions, and hopes that societies place in each generation.