Charbel Coffi is a prolific Beninese artist whose work offers an urgent and thoughtful reflection on life, the land, and the intimate textures of lived experience. In his first solo exhibition in Lagos, Nigeria, titled ROOTED and currently on view at the prestigious Didi Museum, his canvases unfold as visual poetry that explores endurance, grit, and grace.
You walk into this exhibition, searching the works for identity, connection, and resonance. In return, you are met with reflections. You feel a gentle, disarming warmth, an unexpected overwhelm. It hovers around your eyes. You think they are about to water. You hold yourself back. Your skin starts to pulsate. Goosebumps dart around. They turn off and on again. Something invisible seems to be tuning your emotions like a dial.
It isn’t merely the colours, though beautifully muted and leaning into monochrome. Nor is it the exaggerated, pensive figures. Not even those. It’s something more elusive: the tactile scrapes and violent scratches that blur the line between pain and poetry. It is realism carved through scars. But even that falls short. It is pain transfigured into poetry. This exhibition is steeped in reality—your reality and that of everyone you know.
There is a raw energy that possesses the eye in a stare. It is the confluence of natural pigments and the quiet rhythm with which nature translates time and beauty into sensation. Charbel often works with materials such as kaolin, laterite, and clay, and with this exhibition, there is no better way to express the rhythm and pulse of life than through these natural pigments.
The canvases are tactile, embossed with form-defining lines, reminiscent of exaggerated impasto. The subjects appear in reposes of collapse, despondence, or leaning on another for support, or they gaze skyward, pleading with the divine for help or answers. Heaven is where we look up when everything else looks down on us.
Then there is the myth that gives each composition its final touch: the illegible writings, often the last element added to the canvas, appearing only when inspiration strikes. They feel like what speaking in tongues might look like if written down. They are
divine codes, sacred and unreadable. I have come to revere them as such. This exhibition is a visual version of the Book of Psalms.
Trace the quiet poetry in the titles of the works, and a thematic rhythm emerges. The exhibition tells a story from the perspective of the night of the soul: everything that happens before and everything that follows the faint whisper of a possible solution.
Look closely and you find yourself in the frame: alone and scathed, a simmering between rage and resignation, shedding old skin and wearing new wisdom as adornment. You are in the frame: your silence, your resilience, your well-earned joy.
You will remember the last heartbreak you prayed to forget. You will remember how help arrived when all seemed lost. And you will remember what it feels like to be foolish after thinking yourself wise.
We are not made to be defeated. The human design is built for resilience. We either win or learn—we don’t lose, says Charbel during his welcome at the private viewing.
He compares life to the seasons of a tree. Autumn is always a promise of summer. You only need to stay grounded and stay rooted. Tough times don’t last, but tough people do.
If you’re happy today, it means you’ve passed through some sadness. If you’re sad today, it means you’re on your way to joy. Life moves in a flux of good and not-so-pleasant moments. That’s life. That’s what this exhibition is about.
Even without his philosophical explanation, you sense that these artworks aren’t meant to stir melancholy or echo your favourite sad song. Not at all. They feel more like a pat on the back, a quiet moment of personal triumph and vulnerability, and a portrait of your most human self. To live is to feel, and to feel is to care. Pain lingers where love once lived. That’s what it means to be human.
There are twenty-nine (29) mixed media works (acrylic and natural pigments on canvas), each with a one-word title, either an abstract noun or a simple verb.
Together, they create a layered rhythm throughout the exhibition, revealing how the artist personifies action and emotion.
When we feel remorse, the work Mea Culpa expresses this. When we summon even an ounce of courage, pieces like Never Give Up and Perseverance embody that strength. When we need a shoulder to lean on, works like Refuge, Connect, and Consolation offer comfort. In moments of bliss, titles such as Serenity, Safety, Review, Solution, and Relief encapsulate that emotion.
This exhibition is your life: layered, scarred, hopeful. Captured in textures, only the soul remembers.
ROOTED reminds us that what lies buried—grit, scars, memory—is what holds us steady. This exhibition is a mirror. In it, I see me. I see us.
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