I IS ANOTHER

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by Sophie Douay

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Nobel Koty has never been one to linger long on the Other.

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Although the Beninese artist, at the beginning of his career, directed his brush toward faces other than his own, he quickly turned to a subject that would become central to his artistic practice: the self-portrait.

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From then on, canvas after canvas, Nobel Koty set out to unravel the mysteries of his own body. He learned to read the sinuous contours of each wrinkle, to find the precise blend of pigments capable of rendering the exact tone of his skin, to understand which trials of life had shaped his posture. With the utmost precision, he seeks to reveal the depth of his expressions and emotions, laid bare before the eyes of the world. His body becomes a pretext for exploring the many facets of Being. Almost an obsession.

Rembrandt is often said to be the artist who painted the greatest number of self-portraits. Nobel Koty seems well on his way to following in the footsteps of the master he admires…

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So when, guided by instinct or by encounter, Nobel Koty allows himself to momentarily turn away from painting his own self, he produces remarkable series such as The Accused and After a Promise, presented for the very first time in the exhibition I is Another at the Fondation Zinsou’s Lab.

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These “others,” whom the artist chose to paint in these previously unseen series produced in 2024 and 2025, were both unknown to him.

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The first, The Accused, struck him with the intensity of emotions captured within the traumatic space of a trial. Koty did not seek to know more. Instead, he wanted to paint a story—the particularities of a body and its postures, which in some ways recall those of Egon Schiele, but also the immediacy of his own perception, the feelings that emerged.

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The second bears a name: Joël Andrianomearisoa, an artist like Nobel Koty. Following a commission related to the PROMESSE project, Koty set out to portray his peer as though he were himself, attempting to uncover the mysteries of his being—through his nudity, his flesh, and through a multiplicity of facets explored with obsessive intensity.

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Despite their demands, these two projects allowed the artist, as he himself says, to mature his painting, enabling him to return to self-portraiture with even greater force. The Other thus becomes a necessary detour in deepening one’s own “I.” Or perhaps it is the relentless exploration of the self that allows Koty to grasp the truth of the Other with such precision ?

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I is another.

Arthur Rimbaud wrote this phrase while questioning the necessity of allowing other voices to speak through him in order to become a great poet—to live a thousand lives, to decenter oneself. The artist becomes the instrument through which the unknown passes. It is the Other, then, who speaks through him.