Born on 29 April 1999 in Kinshasa (DRC). Lives and works in Montreal in Canada.

Born in Kinshasa in 1999, Exaucé Lianza Basele studied humanities, specialising in literature, and then enrolled at Kinshasa School of Fine Arts in 2019, graduating in 2022. He demonstrated his technical skill right from his first significant works, producing oil portraits with hazy outlines that express the fragility of the human condition.

Following a period spent seeking out other directions, he returned to this theme, making use of a new medium to give an extra dimension: Lianza paints on rice sacks that he frays once he has finished the portrait. By unravelling the fibres, Lianza seeks to express fragility, the fragments of the self that people lose and keep, the ties that are made and broken. In so doing, apart from the symbolic dimension of the process, he produces a stunning “slatted blind” effect, providing us with a glimpse of the private life of subjects with a magnetic presence, some of whom are extremely troubling, and whose feelings are elusive and whose enigmatic nature we seek to understand.

Lianza moved to Montreal in 2023. He is working in the city while continuing his studies.

His work will be shown for the very first time in Europe in March-April 2025 at the gallery.