Heritier Bilaka

Heritier Bilaka is a figurative painter whose work examines the Black body as a site of identity, resilience, memory, and historical presence. His paintings place faceless nude figures, often rendered in black and white, within vivid multicolored environments. Seen from a low angle, these bodies are at once vulnerable, monumental, and deliberately open to interpretation.

Bilaka’s first encounters with art came through hand-painted cinema posters, Japanese manga, and animation, including Dragon Ball Z and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. For him, art became a way to work through loneliness and give structure to an active imagination. He later studied Fine Art at the Academy of Fine Art of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 2002 to 2007, then completed a bachelor’s degree in visual art at the University of Ottawa between 2020 and 2023.

The combination of traditional and contemporary training has shaped the way he approaches painting. He identifies traditional training as the source of his technical and aesthetic foundation, while his later education developed a conceptual and narrative framework. His practice moves between those concerns, using formal decisions in color, pose, and viewpoint to address broader questions of social construction and collective memory.

Bilaka is interested in how beliefs, ideologies, and historical narratives influence the ways Black bodies are represented and understood. His paintings do not offer a fixed account of these questions. Instead, they create a space in which the past and present meet, and in which viewers are asked to bring their own associations to the image. “I consider painting not only as a form of emotional, conceptual, or technical expression, but also as a marker of historical presence, a vehicle for memory,” he says.

The artist’s decision to paint Black figures without faces and from a low-angle perspective was sharpened by a 2022 visit to the Museum of Central Africa in Brussels. There, he encountered sacred ancestral artefacts from Congo alongside colonial-era photographs in which Black people were presented in degrading and dehumanizing ways. On returning to Canada, Bilaka began researching the archival images with the museum’s support. The experience prompted him to reconsider the connotations carried by visual representation and to develop a different pictorial language for depicting nude Black bodies.

In his work, the tension between black-and-white figures and saturated surroundings is intentional. A recent painting marked the first time he used this contrast extensively. The challenge was to establish visual harmony through colors that clash, while allowing the figures to remain integrated into the setting through the handling of light. The result established a direction that has become central to the work.

Bilaka cites Shane Wolf as an influence on his technical approach, particularly in the handling of balance, beauty, and twisting bodies. Salvador Dalí’s surrealism has informed his symbolic methods, while Aeron Douglas, Kerry James Marshall, and Yan Pei-Ming have shaped his thinking on aesthetic, technical, and conceptual levels. Rather than treating these influences as a single style, he uses them as prompts for continued exploration and self-critique.

His process begins with an internal response, which may emerge from a conversation, an observation, an emotion, a question, or a persistent image. Research follows when necessary, along with exchanges with models about poses and the conditions of the session. Drawing is an important early stage, with charcoal sketches and photographs helping establish the work. The painting then develops in solitude, through a sustained conversation with the canvas.

Bilaka’s Congolese and Canadian cultural experiences also inform this practice. He regards the combination as a productive source of difference, allowing him to synthesize distinct ways of seeing art and the world. Outside the studio, conversations with family and others remain important sources of reflection.

He is currently preparing to participate in the Florence Biennale in October 2027. His future ambitions are direct: to continue progressing, to become a reference point for others, and to make work that remains true to his own artistic vision.