In the small 25-square-meter workshop he has been renting since May in Choisy-le-Roi, outside Paris, Rakajoo was busy, day and night, as if indifferent to the sweltering heat inviting fatigue. He was preparing for a summer of hard work, in anticipation of a winter of all kinds of consecrations. A comic book published in January 2024 by Casterman – "a thriller set in Aubervilliers against a boxing backdrop," he told us. That same month, he will occupy the walls of the Parisian gallery Magda Danysz, which has represented him for the past two years. But one prospect above all haunts his nights: his first solo show, in October, at the Palais de Tokyo, following the prize awarded to him by the Amis du Palais de Tokyo group. It's "an opportunity," of which the self-taught artist, who is at last beginning to reach his artistic dream, is well aware.

With the discipline of an athlete and the determination of a samurai, Rakajoo paints until midnight every day, including weekends, after spending 10 hours working on his comic book. His paintings, placed on the floor and covered in red primer, were for the most part unfinished. They revealed his taste for tight framing inspired by comics and cinema, and his way of sketching faces. His daily life too, between Saint-Denis (north of Paris), where he was born in 1986, and "the three châteaux," the Parisian metro stations of Château-Rouge, Château-d'Eau and Châtelet, the epicenter of his youth.

While Rakajoo's own silhouette slips into two canvases to be exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, it is not out of narcissism, but "to add a few lines to the shared narrative." Lines devoid of pathos, without the rage it took him years to tame. "I'm not a prisoner of the past, neither mine nor the colonial era's," he said, before handing us a small melamine tray daubed with his childhood drawings, which he will also display at the Palais de Tokyo. It is his "Rosebud," that little nothing escaped from childhood that sums up the immensity of the path he has traveled.

Before choosing the nickname Rakajoo, which means "stubborn" in Wolof, Baye-Dam Cissé spent a long time searching for proof of his worth in the boxing ring: The youngest of three siblings learned agility, tactics and, above all, how to take a beating without shutting his eyes. "I needed an outlet to keep from going crazy," he explained.

When his family moved to Rue Myrha in the Goutte-d'Or area of Paris 30 years ago, organic eateries hadn't yet sprung up among the Afro hairdressers. At the time, the narrow street attracted all kinds of traffic. Young Baye-Dam avoided the street's delinquents. But in the 23-square-meter apartment, too small for four, tempers soon flared. His mother bore the brunt of tradition and religion. Her youngest son preferred to emancipate himself from his roots, which he regarded as obstacles.

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