With a career spanning three decades, critically acclaimed visual artist Charly D'Almeida, whose creative practice is based in Cotonou, is one of the driving forces furthering the establishment and international radius of contemporary art from Benin, with a following wing of dedicated collectors across the African continent, Europe at large and The United States. 

Concerned with the perils plaguing human society, D'Almeida’s oeuvre confronts viewers with notions of materialism, mass consumerism and the environment. Throughout his practice, D’Almeida aspires to transfigure the human experience by way of a visual narrative that is intrinsically dystopian, bold and arresting.

Although formerly trained as a painter, over the past 15 years, Charly D'Almeida has been perfecting his creed as a sculptural ironsmith, which today confers him the status of a master. Known for molding uniquely idiosyncratic sculptures, through an ingenious use of scraped metal parts and other recycled components, Charly D’Almeida feverishly repurposes, recomposes and reconstitutes the discarded fragments of our humanity, into intricate structures that are all together mesmerizing, gleeful, unnerving and at times discomforting. 

D'Almeida conceives each sculpture as a prayer addressed to Ogun, the emblematic God of Iron & War and the Patron of all Silversmiths, in Benin’s Cosmogony. As if ignited by this divine bolt, metal becomes a means for transmutation, through which the artist reshapes matter itself, ultimately baring apparent the abuse of Mankind upon its environment.  

In essence, Charly D'Almeida's blissful amalgamations, are the portraits of every day life characters, encountered on a street corner, in transit at ann airport, or at the terrace of a café. They are the constituants of a human race in search of redemption.