**__**Kwesi Botchway's painting combines features of realism, impressionism, and self-stylising to form a visual language that he refers to as Afro-Impressionism. Used as a tool to honour and celebrate Blackness in contemporary culture, Botchway's Afro-Impressionism provides a platform for Black perspectives.
Read MoreAfro-Impressionism's characteristics include deeply textured features and contrasting colour schemes. Botchway's art movement represents the energy and emotion of his subjects by painting them in poised compositions wearing luxury fashion against monochromatic backgrounds.
Botchway is interested in the emotional play of portraiture. By expressing the subject's character, culture, and community, the artist's paintings establish a discourse between the subject's message and the viewer, compelling the viewer to become physically and emotionally invested in the subject's story.
Fashion plays a crucial role in the artist's practice and contributes to his subject's depth of character. In many of his paintings, Botchway features Converse trainers, branded caps, and sunglasses, juxtaposing them with traditional African textiles. By merging the contemporary with the traditional, Botchway creates a developing definition of what lifestyle and culture means today.
In this body of work, Botchway uses the colour purple to reconfigure perceptions of beauty and communicate an alternative colour-consciousness. Traditionally, the colour purple connotes royalty, wealth, power, and luxury. By using purple to depict skin colour in his paintings, Botchway connects the idea of Blackness to a history of aesthetic beauty.
Botchway's series depicts a mixture of friends and strangers with red eyes that collectively gaze at viewers from vivid backgrounds. Botchway wants viewers to connect with his subjects, stating, 'as we peer into these piercing, bright eyes, we indeed may perceive windows into other souls, pools of radiant energy, individual struggles, and collective hopes.'
In this series of work, Botchway explores the changing nature of identity and how it relates to racial representation and contemporary perceptions of beauty.
The paintings reflect on the turbulent COVID-19 pandemic and a time of global racial and political unrest. In the work blacklivesmatter (Divine Protesting) (2020), Botchway paints protesters proudly holding up banners and signs promoting the Black Lives Matter movement against a deep yellow background.
