Ludovic Nkoth Probes What It Means to Be Part of History at MASSIMODECARLO

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1582665" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/MASSIMODECARLO_LUDOVIC-NKOTH_202509-012.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="Two paintings hang side by side—men in discussion on one wall, and two figures wrestling on the other." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Ludovic Nkoth’s “Physical Proof” at MASSIMODECARLO in Milan. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photo by: Roberto Marossi Courtesy: MASSIMODECARLO</span>’>

Ludovic Nkoth was born in Cameroon, but at 13, he left his birth family and moved to the U.S., settling first in South Carolina, where he was raised, as he says, as “a stranger in a strange land.” This condition of displacement, but also adaptation, sharpened his ability to be a keen observer of human behavior, attuned to the subtle emotional and psychological movements expressed in body language and gesture—elements he now translates into his vibrantly expressive, texturally layered and profoundly human paintings.

Today, Nkoth is represented internationally by François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and MASSIMODECARLO, two galleries that have secured him a rapidly rising profile, considerably higher prices and growing recognition not only in the market but also at an institutional level since his debut in 2022. Having not presented a show for almost two years after Maison La Roche in Paris, Nkoth has had the time to research and, more importantly, to elaborate on his experience there. That was also when I last saw him, and it was clear how much the residency had given him. “Paris was such a beautiful moment of growth, of understanding and of simply being an artist. More than at any other time in my life, I truly felt like an artist in Paris,” Nkoth tells Observer.

Those two years were also necessary for him to process and absorb the many life-changing shifts that accompanied his growing recognition on both an artistic and personal level. He worked on this show alone for at least nine months, though some ideas had been gestating far longer. When we entered his Brooklyn studio a month before the opening—surrounded by nearly fifty canvases of varying sizes—it was apparent how significantly Nkoth had evolved, not only in style but in his approach to the canvas and to the images that emerge upon it. Although still figurative, the paintings are anything but literal; instead, they unfold as fragmented yet evocative narratives that transcend individual experience to tap into deeper existential questions.

All of Nkoth’s paintings stem from the identitarian struggle of his youth, engaging in an intuitive emotional inquiry through painting that probes questions of identity, migration, memory and belonging. While his earlier works drew heavily from personal experiences and family archives, this new body of work reaches toward an epic, even mythical register in its visual narration—addressing a more universal condition, the comedy and drama of existence as earthly bodies with spiritual aspirations. “For this show, I’ve been borrowing from different sources: other people’s family archives, online collections and even historical paintings,” he says. “In my earlier work, everything was deeply personal, but with this body of work, while the foundation is still rooted in my own experience, the stories expand outward—they reflect the shared narratives we all move through.” He has been drawing more and more from the world. “To me, the show is about what it feels like to be a witness today: what it means to be part of history. I’m filtering that through vulnerability, strength and the perspective of childhood—because so much is happening to children right now.”

This resonates powerfully in Quiet Combat (2025), an evocative image with an epic tone: a young boy dressed as a soldier stands between mythological figures, embodying both vulnerability and the fragile performance of courage demanded by masculine social roles and their associated literary tropes. Themes of freedom and justice course through the show, emphasizing storytelling and narrative as vehicles for addressing not only what it means to be human today but also the broader existential struggle for meaning that has accompanied humanity for centuries. Archetypal figures and tropes—the fight, the solitary warrior, the wanderer—recur in Nkoth’s paintings, echoing myths and ancient tales across cultures. Scenes of ordinary Black life—family gatherings, neighborhood moments, children at play—are reframed with mythic grandeur, as if each fleeting gesture were part of a larger, timeless story.

Nkoth’s works now approach the evocative yet existentially grounded ambiguity found in the paintings of Noah Davis, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye or Kerry James Marshall. Like theirs, his narratives remain open-ended, holding scenes of humanity in tension between the intimate and the monumental, the personal and the universal, giving his canvases an epic resonance untethered in time.

“I don’t think my work ever exists in just one space; it’s always somewhere in the middle,” Nkoth reflects. For him, painting should never prescribe or deliver definitive answers; rather, it should raise questions. “The viewer is invited to bring in their own perspective, so the work ultimately becomes about where their experience meets mine.”

One of his paintings in Milan embodies this approach with particular force: Freedom and Justice (2025). A ghostly figure of a Black man stands on a white horse before a monument, stark against a nebulous, starry night. The piece was inspired by Nkoth’s time in Ghana. “I was at the Black Star Monument, taking photos, and when I came back home, I started piecing things together,” he says. As he painted, layering the words “freedom” and “justice” carved on the monument, he noticed how they kept fading away. “I thought that was a beautiful metaphor. So I kept it.”

Nkoth also wanted to code the painting further, weaving in other narratives and archetypal presences. The horse emerges as both powerful and vulnerable in its thin physique—so strong, yet once domesticated, as if it had already forgotten its primordial power. “That feels like many of us, in a way,” Nkoth reflects, noting how the human figure on the horse strides forward fiercely while also looking back toward the idea of freedom and justice, as if swallowed by the immensity of the night.

The tension between abstraction and figuration also feels more deliberate here, harnessed for its full evocative power. In several works, fragments of earlier washes and layers remain visible beneath the heavily loaded brushstrokes that later formed the subject. For Nkoth, this relentless process of covering, erasing and allowing different moments to coexist is an act of acceptance. “You either choose to keep those traces or cover them completely,” he says, explaining that the tension is what interests him. “The first layers reemerge because I kept seeing them, and they sit in contrast to the heavy palette and dense brushwork laid over them.”

His back-and-forth between looseness and structure now feels more intentional, more finely calibrated. Nkoth plays with the rhythm of his brushstrokes—sometimes giving them body and weight, other times letting a lighter, more fleeting presence emerge. This range of subtle variations in layering and the push and pull between veils is something he can now achieve more fully since shifting from acrylic to oil painting, which gives him greater room for experimentation. “You need to have a plan, but after experimenting so much, I feel the plan now is simply to listen better,” Nkoth reflects. “You listen to what the painting is saying, and you follow it. It becomes more of a research practice, a way of investigating the painting.”

Nkoth explains that every painting in the show somehow led to the next, each element allowing the following one to be discovered. For him, each work is only loosely preplanned; the discovery is part of the process. “Many of these things never existed before I started painting,” he explains. “You have to listen to what’s unfolding: how this part informs that corner, how that corner changes the feel of another. It’s all in that dialogue with the canvas.”

In several pieces, Nkoth deliberately enters into dialogue with art history, engaging the resistance and resilience of images and visual tropes over time, while simultaneously experimenting with the image itself, letting it transform as new elements emerge or recede. “I think it’s meaningful to play with art history while showing in Italy,” he reflects, noting his intent to engage with masters familiar to local audiences. “It feels like a way to step into that ongoing conversation and open it up.”

In Proof of the Incredulous (2025), Nkoth draws from Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Saint Thomas to address human vulnerability and the wall we tend to build when wounded, as a way of hiding pain. “Normally, when you’re hurt, you build a wall so no one can see. Here, I wanted to show the opposite—that you need to let people in when you’re wounded, because that’s the only way they can truly understand how you feel,” Nkoth explains. To bring the scene into a contemporary moment, while blending it with elements of Black life experience, he restaged the evangelical narrative within the world of boxing. The composition still carries a tension in space, yet it also reads as an art historical tableau, the figures arranged with the solemnity of a religious scene.

Other paintings depict dancers, often isolated in their corporeal and psychological presence, suspended within minimal, monochromatic backgrounds. Nkoth recalls how he first became fascinated with dance in Paris, when he went to see Dante’s Inferno. “It might have been my first time at the ballet, and I remember thinking about how they make it look so elegant and effortless, when you can see the muscle mass and understand how hard it truly is.” That experience led him to think about the relationship between dance and painting. “The paintings I admire most are the ones that feel effortless, but when you try to make something like that yourself, you realize how much mastery it takes. That’s what I wanted to capture with dance: the appearance of ease built on intense discipline.”

These ballet-inspired paintings also reveal how Nkoth has been training himself toward greater discipline, reducing his palette and surface to a more contained number of pigments and gestures compared to the lush, crowded compositions of only a few years ago. “Now I’m more interested in what happens when you strip that away—when the negative space itself becomes more active than anything else,” he says. Achieving that is harder than the exuberant maximalism he once embraced, but it feels more rewarding. “Figures are exciting, but what excites me just as much is the space and the shapes they create between them.”

The focus in the paintings in the exhibition is on the idea of bodies performing—dancing on a stage, calibrating gestures or deliberately inhabiting their own characters. “I think there’s so much performance in simply existing—whether you’re performing in a relationship or in a workspace, there’s always something happening,” Nkoth reflects. “I’m captivated by how we move through these performances in life.”

Another painting extends this theme to a more sociological level, engaging with collective psychology that hovers between propaganda and shared imagination. In The American Dream (2025), a group of children appears as if floating along a street that turns into a river, flowing across the canvas in front of a huge white mansion. The image is both striking and haunting, carrying the blurred, nonsensical quality of a dream or hallucination. “It’s tied to the idea of the American dream—we all imagine the big house, the kids, the long life,” explains Nkoth. “But then you start to realize how much performance goes into achieving that. You have to flip, turn and often be uncomfortable just to claim even a part of this dream.” Yet throughout the show, Nkoth resists the possibility of a single, unilateral narration. “I wanted to create a show that feels like a story as a whole, while ensuring each piece can still stand on its own and tell its own story.”

He has instead focused on conceiving the works—particularly through the choice of tones and colors—so that they create a meaningful dialogue with the interiors of the Piero Portaluppi-designed Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, MASSIMODECARLO’s Milan venue. As Nkoth acknowledges, the space itself is rich with elegant details—from floors and marbles in deep reds and greens to refined finishes everywhere—that cannot be ignored. “I realized that with a space like this, you either accept what’s already there or reject it,” he reflects. “I prefer the idea of accepting it, because then you’re able to collaborate with the space, to respond directly to what’s already present.” On the floor of his maquette model, Nkoth showed how he already had a clear vision for how each painting would fit within the space or create suggestive juxtapositions with it.

Still, across the works in the show, Nkoth has been fully exploring the pleasure of painting on technical, thematic and imaginative levels. These are paintings one can sit with: each time you return, they give you something more, in an open-ended process of decoding and discovery. The works leave us wondering what is really happening: is it about the painting itself, the technique, or the viewer? How much of the narrative belongs to the artist, how much is embedded in the work and how much is left to the audience? This, after all, is the power of painting: to transcend individuality and time, meeting viewers where they are, resonating with universal truths and questions we all share.

In works such as Mapping Sea (2025) and Tides (2025), Nkoth uses a coded symbolic language of dreams and the subconscious, seeding his paintings with allegorical and metaphorical elements that connect to broader narratives. “It’s about opening up to more universal situations that invite others to place themselves within the story,” he explains. “You can’t escape your own personal history, that’s true, but I’m using my story to speak to something larger, and I’m hoping now the work resonates on a more universal level.” This, he says, is the magic of painting. For him, painting is not about representation or documenting reality, but about asking: what does painting mean to me? “In a way, it’s an escape from reality while still engaging with it,” he reflects, explaining how it allows him to address subjects that might feel uncomfortable to discuss in daily life, yet that he can bring into the work through allegorical and metaphorical language.

“We already have too much reality bombarding us daily, endless images claiming to document our lives. The world is already flooded with images, and our attention spans keep getting shorter precisely because most of those images contain no soul, no true value. What painting offers instead is a level of magic: a painting can suggest, hint, open a space where reality filters in indirectly.” It is in that space, he suggests, that painting can reveal a more profound truth we were not even aware of. “That’s why we still go to museums, to sit in front of a painting—because there you can feel the soul, not only of the creator, but also of the people and the time that gave rise to it.”

Ludovic Nkoth’s “Physical Proof” is at MASSIMODECARLO in Milan through November 15, 2025.

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