Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s time to talk about Sahara Longe (born in 1994 in London). This British artist of Sierra Leonean descent is not just another figurative painter who happened to study in Florence. No, she is much more than that. She is living proof that classical painting can be subverted, reinvented, and propelled into our time with an explosive force that will make you forget all your prejudices about contemporary art.
In her Brixton studio, Longe creates works that are like visual slaps to artistic conventions. Trained for four years at the Charles H. Cecil Studio in Florence, she masters traditional oil painting techniques with surgical precision. Look at her semi-abstract portraits, with their carmine-rich backgrounds and dove-gray tones. These barely sketched faces, immediately recognizable by the tilt of a head or the position of hands in pockets, are like ghosts haunting our collective consciousness. Longe creates a new form of aura, a spectral presence that transcends the limits of traditional representation.
Her oil painting technique, using tree sap mixed with turpentine, gives her works a particular luminosity reminiscent of Rubens’ paintings. But where Rubens glorified white European aristocracy, Longe places black figures in positions of power and grace. This is not a simple exercise in historical revision; it’s a radical reappropriation of Western pictorial language.
Her treatment of color is revolutionary. Her bold use of vermilion, emerald, and lilac creates complex psychological spaces that transcend mere representation. These chromatic choices are not arbitrary; they are anchored in a deep understanding of art history, from Kirchner to Kandinsky, while remaining resolutely contemporary. As Theodor Adorno would have said, her art skillfully navigates between aesthetic autonomy and social engagement.
Take her street scenes and group compositions. Influenced by German expressionism, they capture the very essence of contemporary urban life. The figures, reduced to their essential geometric forms, nevertheless retain a powerful presence that reminds us of Roland Barthes’ observations on photography: it’s not so much the precision of details that matters as the “punctum”, that poignant detail that pierces us.
In her commissioned portraits, such as the one created for His Majesty King Charles III’s Windrush collection, Longe demonstrates her ability to merge tradition and innovation. She captures not only the physical likeness of her subjects but also their spiritual essence, creating what John Berger would call alternative “ways of seeing” that defy the conventions of traditional portraiture.
Her treatment of bodies, particularly in her nudes, is remarkable. Unlike the Western tradition that has long objectified the female body, Longe creates figures that possess their own agency. These bodies are not passive objects of the male gaze but active subjects that confront us with our own prejudices. This is precisely what Simone de Beauvoir evoked when speaking of the necessity to transcend the immanence imposed on women.
Her classical training in Florence could have condemned her to eternally reproduce the same worn pictorial formulas. Instead, she uses these technical skills as a starting point for a radical exploration of identity, power, and representation. Her works are like visual palindromes that can be read in both directions: toward the past of art history and toward the future of contemporary representation.
The social scenes she depicts, often inspired by Brixton nightlife, are not mere superficial observations. They are complex anthropological studies that reveal the social dynamics of our time. Her characters, reduced to their essential forms but overflowing with character, remind us that recognition can come from a simple gesture, a posture, a movement frozen in time.
Her use of line is particularly fascinating. Influenced by Kandinsky, who compared painting to a song, she uses lines like musical notes to guide the viewer’s eye through the composition. These lines are not mere contours; they are vectors of meaning that create a visual choreography on the canvas.
Her treatment of space is equally remarkable. Her semi-abstract backgrounds are not simple settings; they are psychological force fields that amplify the emotional impact of her figures. This approach recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories on the phenomenology of perception: space is not a neutral container but an active element of our perceptual experience.
Her work on burlap or thick linen is not a simple technical choice. It’s a conscious decision that anchors her works in a material tradition while allowing them to explore new expressive territories. The rough texture of the support creates a productive tension with the fluidity of her pictorial technique, generating what Gilles Deleuze would call “zones of indiscernibility” between figure and ground.
Longe’s portraits are not mere representations; they are manifestations of what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible”. By placing black figures in positions traditionally reserved for white subjects in art history, she is not just correcting a historical injustice – she is creating new possibilities for perception and recognition.
The way she manipulates light is remarkable. Her subtle glazes and strategically placed highlights create an inner luminosity that emanates from the figures themselves. This sophisticated technical approach is not simply decorative; it participates in constructing the work’s meaning, creating what Georges Didi-Huberman would call “surviving images”.
Her approach to pictorial narrative is particularly innovative. Rather than simply illustrating stories, she creates moments of narrative suspension that invite the viewer to complete the narrative. These seemingly everyday scenes are charged with dramatic tension that recalls Roland Barthes’ theories on the “pregnant moment” in photography.
The restricted palette she uses – ivory black, vermillion red, yellow ochre, raw sienna, lead white, and ultramarine blue – is not a limitation but a deliberate choice that reinforces the impact of her works. As Josef Albers pointed out, restricting the number of colors can paradoxically lead to greater richness of expression.
Her treatment of hands, inspired by John Singer Sargent, is very interesting. These hands, almost geometric in their simplification, become vehicles of expression as powerful as faces. This is what Henri Focillon called the “life of forms”: the ability of artistic forms to generate their own meaning beyond their representative function.
The way she subtly integrates personal references in her works – such as when she hides her self-portrait in a crowd, in the manner of Velázquez – adds a playful dimension to her work without compromising its fundamental gravity. These little winks create what Pierre Bourdieu would call a “double game” between the artist and the informed viewer.
The large formats she favors are not a simple aesthetic choice. They create a direct physical relationship with the viewer, generating what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called an “intercorporeality”: a direct bodily relationship between the work and its viewer. These imposing dimensions force a physical confrontation that amplifies the emotional impact of her compositions.
Longe reminds us that true innovation can come from an intelligent reinterpretation of tradition. Her work is not a break with the past but an ongoing conversation with art history, creating what T.S. Eliot called a “simultaneous order” where past and present mutually nourish each other. She doesn’t just paint faces or bodies; she creates presences that inhabit space with rare intensity. Her figures look at us with a quiet assurance that defies any attempt at reduction to mere objects of aesthetic contemplation. This is exactly what Jean-Paul Sartre described when speaking of the other’s gaze as constitutive of our own self-consciousness.
Her work on the geometrization of forms, particularly visible in her recent works, is not a simple formal exercise. It’s an exploration of what Wassily Kandinsky called “inner necessity”: the capacity of abstract forms to communicate directly with the viewer’s soul. Her geometrized figures retain their humanity while transcending the limits of naturalistic representation.
Sahara Longe’s art confronts us with a fundamental truth that Martin Heidegger had grasped: the artwork is not a simple aesthetic object, but a place where truth sets itself to work. In her canvases, past and present, tradition and innovation, individual and universal meet in a fertile dialectic that opens new horizons of meaning. Her work embodies what Hannah Arendt called “natality”: the human capacity to introduce something new into the world, to begin something unpredictable. Through her brushes, she doesn’t just paint faces or bodies – she creates spaces of freedom where new forms of subjectivity can emerge. Her paintings remind us that art can still be a place of resistance, transformation, and reinvention of self. This is exactly what we need today.