Lauriane Itoua (Lylo)

Lylo is a self-taught painter born in 1986 in Saint Petersburg, of Congolese and Bulgarian origin. She grew up in France, where she built her pictorial language on her own — with only one year at the Bellecour school as a starting point, and the rest through practice, observation, and persistence.
Her subjects are strangers, archetypes — the angel, the father and child, the woman on the subway, the man who looks up. Figures that everyone has already passed by without really looking. Lylo looks at them.
Her technique is inverted: she paints light rather than shadows, working white over black to bring forth faces. The Black figure is not a political subject for her—it is something older, more internal. A mystical presence she seeks in each canvas, somewhere between her heritages.