WELCOME TO MY INSTABILITY – MERVEILLE KELEKELE KELEKELE

SEPTEMBER 6th – OCTOBER 26th, 2025

Opening on Friday, September 5th, 2025 with the artist

Bienvenue dans mon instability(Welcome to my instability) is Merveille Kelekele Kelekele‘s response to the invitation to exhibit at Galerie du Jour agnès b. For his first solo show in France, the artist guides visitors on a journey through her emotional instability: an intimate space where his sensations come face to face, populated by strange creatures and symbols inspired by his life.

Born on February 6, 2001 in Mbuji-Mayi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Merveille grew up in Kinshasa until the age of 9, when he and his family were forced to leave the country. A long journey followed, taking them to Belgium, Spain and then Portugal, which became their first home. Far from his comfortable life in Congo, he became aware of the social and racial realities of the West.

Merveille materializes his experience in his works: “I feel, therefore I express myself.” For him, instability translates a state where we are not aligned with our being. He experiences his as a series of intense, corporeal vibrations, a dialogue between his body and the world. His large formats become essential spaces for the nuances of his personality and of what lies beyond him. His visceral canvases are attempts to make the sensations that run through him accessible and tangible.

One of his paintings says: “The nights are long, the days no longer exist. A presence clings to me, touches me, follows me…So I paint it, so that it may leave me.“

He unfolds his vision of intimacy. A creature appears, holds him by the leg, exhausts him. It dances in his paranoia, whispering secrets, blurring time. Her forms are organic, elusive, shot through with muted tension. Vibrant, unstable compositions evoke a world in its grip. The deep, gradated colors convey a restrained violence, somewhere between the troubled and the sacred.

Merveille never paints the same stories. Each work is a fragment of her person, unique but porous, in dialogue with others, nourished by the human in all its complexity and vulnerability.

“Don’t stab your old scars”

Bienvenue dans mon instabilité is an immersive, unsettling experience that’s less about understanding than about feeling. And no one, not even Merveille, really knows what emotions it will awaken.

Ami Diouf
Curator in collaboration with agnès b.