Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Isshaq Ismail paints faces that look at you with the boldness of those who have nothing to lose. Born in 1989 in Accra, this Ghanaian artist has been producing a body of work for a decade that shakes up the aesthetic canons with assumed brutality and remarkable formal intelligence. His canvases, saturated with bright colors and populated by figures with exaggerated features, swollen lips, and flattened faces, are much more than mere visual provocation. They embody a critical reflection on contemporary identity, on what it means to exist in a world obsessed with normative beauty and social conformity.
What the artist himself calls “infantile semi-abstraction” [1] is anything but infantile in the pejorative sense of the word. This term, on the contrary, constitutes a formidable conceptual strategy: by mimicking the apparent simplicity of children’s drawings, Ismail frees painting from the constraints of academic representation. The generous impasto, the thick layer of paint he applies with a palette knife, transforms his canvases into tactile reliefs, surfaces that seem to pulse beneath the thickness of pictorial material. The gestural, thick brushstrokes, loaded with saturated pigments, build portraits that oscillate between caricature and the sacred, between derision and gravity. This formal freedom is not gratuitous: it allows the artist to say what conventions do not tolerate, to show what academic beauty conceals.
There is an obvious lineage, although never explicitly claimed by Ismail, with the work of Francis Bacon. The British painter, whose canvases haunted the second half of the twentieth century, made grotesque his territory of choice. In Bacon’s work, bodies twist, faces dissolve, human flesh becomes meat. Critics have often described his figures as “violently distorted, almost like pieces of raw meat, which are isolated souls imprisoned and tormented by existential dilemmas” [2]. This aesthetic of distortion was not a mere stylistic exercise: it reflected a post-war vision of humanity, wounded, traumatized, deprived of certainties.
Ismail continues this dialogue with the grotesque but shifts and reinvents it for our time. Where Bacon painted the existential angst of the Western individual faced with metaphysical void, Ismail focuses on bodies marked by postcolonial realities, by the violences of contemporary capitalism, by aesthetic norms that hierarchize human beings. His grotesque figures directly question the notions of beauty and ugliness, desirability and repulsiveness. Who decides these categories? By what criteria does a face deserve to be represented, contemplated, loved? The Ghanaian artist turns these questions against the viewer with formidable effectiveness. His portraits with exaggerated features challenge the gaze, forcing it to confront its own aesthetic prejudices.
Ismail’s very technique evokes that of Bacon, who compared his work to that of a sculptor molding clay. The Ghanaian artist describes his process in similar terms: he manipulates the paint like a malleable material, building his figures through the accumulation of layers, scraping, and successive additions. This sculptural approach gives the faces an intense physical presence. They are not simply depicted on the canvas: they seem to emerge from it, to be extracted from it. The impasto layers create shadows, reliefs, a facial topography that makes each portrait unique in its very materiality. This tactile dimension matters as much as the visual one: Ismail’s works demand to be seen up close, requiring the viewer to approach in order to grasp their full formal richness.
But the grotesque in Ismail differs from that of Bacon in one essential way: whereas the British painter cultivated a form of metaphysical despair, the Ghanaian artist maintains a tension between critique and hope. His figures, distorted though they may be, never fall into nihilism. They remain imbued with what he calls “desire, elevation, strength, resilience, joy, and hope” which prove that “the human subject is never totally destroyed by adversity or violence” [1]. This affirmative dimension radically distinguishes Ismail from his European predecessors. For him, the grotesque becomes a tool of resistance, a means of claiming a place in the field of representation for those who are usually excluded from it.
This approach finds a powerful echo in the work of sociologist Erving Goffman on stigma and social identity. In his foundational book published in 1963, Goffman analyzes how certain bodily or social attributes cast a deep discredit on the individuals who bear them [3]. The sociologist distinguishes three types of stigmas: bodily deformities, moral blemishes, and tribal stigmas related to race, nationality, or religion. What interests Goffman is less the stigma itself than the social relationship it produces: an attribute becomes stigmatizing only in the eyes of others, in the gap it creates between what Goffman calls the virtual social identity (what is expected of a “normal” person) and the actual social identity (what they actually are).
The figures painted by Ismail can be read as visual incarnations of this tension in Goffman. They bear on their very faces the mark of their deviation from the norm, their difference. Their exaggerated features, their claimed ugliness, constitute visible stigmas that place them outside the canons of Western beauty. But instead of hiding these stigmas, instead of practicing what Goffman calls “impression management” (the strategy whereby the stigmatized individual hides their discredited attribute), Ismail exhibits them, amplifies them, and transforms them into aesthetic weapons. This logic recalls what some sociologists have called “stigma reversal”: the process by which stigmatized people appropriate the attributes that discredit them to make them emblems of pride, markers of a claimed collective identity.
The Ghanaian artist precisely performs this reversal in the pictorial field. By painting faces that fully embrace their grotesqueness, their non-conformity to dominant beauty standards, he shifts the stigma of the depicted body towards the gaze that judges. It is no longer the painted figure that poses a problem, but the aesthetic value system that rejects it. Ismail “represents the masses and defends the voiceless” [2] by giving monumental visibility to those whom Western artistic canons have historically excluded or caricatured. His portraits become acts of resistance against what Goffman would call the “normative expectations” of the art world.
This sociological dimension of Ismail’s work is particularly evident in his series of blue monochrome works, created during his residency at the Efie gallery in Dubai in 2023. By covering his figures with a uniform lapis lazuli blue, the artist erases the racial markers of his characters. They are no longer black or white, nor clearly identifiable to a specific geographical origin. This chromatic operation universalizes the faces while preserving their expressive charge. Blue, a color traditionally associated with royal power, depth, and spirituality, confers a paradoxical dignity to the figures. They remain grotesque in form but noble in presentation. This tension between form and color, between structural ugliness and chromatic beauty, further intensifies the questioning of the criteria for aesthetic judgment.
Ismail’s approach fits into a broader inquiry about what it means to be seen, to be recognized as a subject in contemporary societies. Goffman emphasized that identity is always constructed in interaction, in the gaze of the other. Stigmatized individuals must constantly manage the information they present, control their self-presentation to minimize discredit. They live in what Goffman calls “mixed contacts,” these tense interactions between “normals” and stigmatized where each must negotiate their place. The figures painted by Ismail refuse this negotiation. They do not seek to adapt to the viewer’s gaze, to make themselves acceptable. They impose their presence with a directness that leaves no escape. The spectator cannot look away, cannot ignore what he sees. He is forced to position himself facing these faces that challenge him.
This visual strategy resonates with what the artist himself describes as a desire to make polemical statements about contemporary socio-political circumstances. His canvases are not mere formal studies: they constitute critical interventions in debates on identity, race, power, and representation. By choosing to paint the grotesque, Ismail tackles a fundamental political question: who has the right to be considered beautiful, worthy of being represented in art? Aesthetic canons are never neutral; they reflect and reinforce social, racial, and economic hierarchies. By contesting them head-on, the Ghanaian artist participates in a broader struggle for recognition and dignity.
Ismail’s work’s strength lies in his ability to simultaneously maintain multiple levels of reading. His canvases first function as powerful visual objects, saturated with colors, built with an immediately perceptible gestural energy. They captivate the eye before disturbing the consciousness. But beneath this hedonistic surface hides a sharp critique of the mechanisms of distinction and hierarchy that structure our societies. Ismail’s grotesque figures are distorting mirrors that reflect back our own symbolic violence, our own aesthetic prejudices. They force us to recognize that our judgments about beauty and ugliness are never innocent, that they always carry power relations, exclusions, and violence.
This critical lucidity does not prevent Ismail’s work from radiating a form of stubborn optimism. His figures, despite their grotesqueness, despite the stigmas they bear, exude vitality, an affirmative presence. They exist fully, without shame or concealment. They embody the possibility that Goffman evoked of an identity claim that transforms the stigma into an emblem. In this sense, Ismail’s work is part of a project of reappropriation: reappropriation of the right to ugliness, reappropriation of the grotesque as a legitimate aesthetic category, and reappropriation of representation by those who have been historically excluded.
Ismail’s meteoric rise on the international art market is a testament to the recognition of this approach. In less than a decade, his works have gone from a few thousand euros to hundreds of thousands in auction sales. This commercial success might seem contradictory to the artist’s critical message. How to reconcile a radical critique of dominant aesthetic norms with successful integration into the most established circuits of the art world? This tension is not unique to Ismail: it runs through the entire history of critical and avant-garde art. But it deserves to be highlighted, as it reveals the art system’s capacity to absorb, even neutralize the most virulent criticisms by transforming them into desirable commodities.
However, it would be reductive to see Ismail’s success only as a commercial co-optation. His works continue to pose uncomfortable questions, to disturb certainties. They maintain this productive tension between aesthetic fascination and ideological unease that characterizes great critical works. They remind us that the fight for dignity and recognition is not only played out in the political or social field, but also in the symbolic field of representation. Painting the grotesque, giving monumental visibility to what is usually rejected or hidden, constitutes a political act in itself. It is affirming that all faces deserve to be seen, that all existences deserve to be recognized, that beauty cannot be the prerogative of a minority conforming to Western canons.
Isshaq Ismail belongs to this generation of African artists who refuse to be confined to the role of illustrators of exoticism or witnesses of misfortune. He asserts the right to a complex plastic expression, intellectually demanding, formally daring. His work dialogues with the history of Western art (Bacon, Basquiat) as much as with Ghanaian artistic traditions. It is part of contemporary theoretical debates on identity and representation while maintaining an immediate visual impact. This ability to work simultaneously on multiple levels, to articulate the formal and the political, the local and the universal, criticism and celebration, makes him a major artist of his generation. His paintings do not offer definitive answers to the questions they raise. They keep open the wounds, tensions, and contradictions that traverse our societies. They remind us that the struggle for recognition is far from over, that the right to full and complete existence remains to be conquered for a large part of humanity. And they do so with a strength, urgency, and formal intelligence that make them unforgettable.
- Gallery 1957, “Isshaq Ismail”, gallery1957.com, accessed in October 2025
- Sotheby’s, “Isshaq Ismail Biography”, sothebys.com, accessed in October 2025
- Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1975 [1963]
