Art Born from Fire: The Unyielding Vision of Messe Bidias

I first came across Messe Bidias through a newspaper article recounting his eventful artistic journey and personal life. His colourful, audacious visual language immediately intrigued me. I went on to find other articles about him, followed his work online and eventually landed a forty-minute Zoom conversation with the artist himself.

To understand the urgency behind Messe’s paintings, however, one has to return to Cameroon and a seven-year-old boy fascinated by a drawing.

Where it began

Messe’s first connection with art came during a childhood holiday in his family’s village. His uncle often drew, and one day Messe saw a sketch he had made of boxers Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield in a ring. The image sparked something. Soon Messe was drawing too, beginning with cartoon characters such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and drawing with chalk on his school slate.

Formal artistic training, however, was not available to him. While his sister was able to study art, Messe pursued accounting—yet continued making art, even helping with his sister’s artistic assignments for three years.

As a teenager, he created Ziczo art school, voluntarily teaching neighbourhood children to draw and paint. This instinct to share knowledge would remain important throughout his career.

At twenty-six, in 2016, Messe finally committed himself to art full-time. In Cameroon, where he experienced a climate of corruption, inequality and restricted expression, painting became both freedom and resistance. His canvases allowed him to address political dysfunction, social and gender inequalities, religious indoctrination and the suffering of society’s most vulnerable. Works such as Police-ticks, for instance, confront the behaviour of political leaders.

That same year, armed conflict between Anglophone separatists and Cameroon’s national forces erupted in the Southwest region. Messe was forced to flee. Internally displaced, he found himself rebuilding his life with no home and approximately twenty dollars in his pocket. He eventually settled in Yaoundé.

When painting became therapy

Another ordeal would profoundly reshape his life and practice.

Messe suffered a stroke that left half of his body partially paralysed. His recovery and rehabilitation lasted approximately two years. He sold his paintings one after another to cover medical expenses, while the physical act of painting itself suddenly required tremendous effort and discipline.

Yet those years also deepened his spirituality and transformed art into therapy. Messe told me that the paintings he produced during his convalescence would eventually help launch his career several years later.

Something else he shared stayed with me: he hardly ever paints when everything is going well.

Pain and negative energy often send him back to the canvas. Through painting, he attempts to transmute that energy into something powerful and therapeutic. Perhaps that helps explain the extraordinary tension and vitality of his work.

Messe works primarily in acrylic, often on large-format canvases. His visual language combines neo-expressionism with African artistic traditions and elements of cubism, surrealism and pop art. Ancient African figures and symbols mingle with abstract forms, erratic writings, intricate patterns and vibrant, sometimes fluorescent colours.

His work confronts difficult realities, but it is not defined by anger alone. Messe remains fascinated by human beauty, nature, music and art in all its forms. His paintings celebrate the beauty, strength and resilience of African people and the diaspora, creating a dialogue between heritage and contemporary life, struggle and hope, past and future.

Art as a collective endeavour

Messe is equally concerned with the conditions under which African artists create.

He has spoken about limited artistic infrastructure and exhibition opportunities in Cameroon, along with the difficulty artists face in earning a living and receiving fair prices for their work. Such conditions can foster intense competition between artists.

Messe rejects that mentality.

He believes selfishness ultimately weakens their collective ability to bring beauty into society, speak to the world and advocate for a better future. His own commitment to transmission extends from the Ziczo art school of his adolescence to the free lessons he later gave children in Yaoundé. He has also mentored other artists, including his brothers Elangweh Sesse, now based in Texas, and Bidias Romaric, both of whom have developed their own artistic careers.

The limited opportunities available locally also encouraged Messe to take his work beyond Cameroon. He has exhibited in France, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States, Cameroon, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Congo-Brazzaville, while pursuing relationships with galleries, art fairs, schools, brands, collectors and curators internationally.

Today, Messe works in Geneva, but Africa remains deeply present in his artistic language and concerns.

Freedom as the destination

Messe told me that his dream is ultimately to be free as an artist and leave behind a strong artistic legacy.

Perhaps that ambition contains the essence of his practice. On his canvases, suffering becomes colour, injustice becomes testimony, African heritage encounters the present, and difficult realities are transformed into possibilities.

For Messe Bidias, art is not an escape from the world.

It is his way of confronting it—and imagining what it could become.

You can follow him here:

https://www.instagram.com/messe_bidias/

Tweets by MasseRackel

https://m.facebook.com/messebidias/

Here are some interesting articles about Messe (in English only):

https://boldjourney.com/meet-rackel-messe-a-bidias/

https://shoutouthtx.com/meet-rackel-messe-a-bidias-visual-and-contemporal-artist/

Location: Douala (Cameroon)