The painting “Flight from Rio to Saint-Denis” is a parallel that mentions two places with a high percentage of black population and immigrants, Saint-Denis in France and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
The portrait represents a young black man in a moment of leisure. The painting confronts us with the exaltation of people who feel complete, self-confident, in contrast to the images created in the last few centuries; portraits in which the black population was mostly represented in situations that corroborated the colonial trauma or even portraits that do not exist in the history of Western art.
The artist inserts a hidden gem into the painting, a small Eiffel Tower, one of the most iconic symbols of France, usually marketed by black immigrants to tourists as a souvenir of one of the most coveted and luxurious places in the world.