At the age of 16, Ingénieur Vancy began to make a miniature car with his hands, pushing his parents to enroll him in general mechanics studies. After his diploma, he worked in a garage but, very quickly dissatisfied, he decided to stop this job to devote himself to art. He then began drawing, which he had been passionate about since childhood, first on paper, then on canvas. Self-taught, he did not follow any artistic training, benefiting from a "gift of god".
Like many young Africans, imagination and invention was a tactile endeavour. The fabrication of toy cars, for instance was a practice found throughout sub-Saharan Africa in the latter part of the 20th century (and continues). In part it served the purpose of self-amusement, but also it created a barter or trading object. The toy racing cars fashioned out of cans, cigarette cartons and pieces of wood, for instance were marketed as far afield as Craft Caravan the cult store in New York City in the 1980s and 90s as well as flea markets in other colonial centres such as Paris and Brussels.
Vancy’s interaction with this rite of passage led him to embark upon an actual career in mechanics which did not suit his temperament and his introspective creativity diverged from dealing with steel, to creating representations of objects such as cars. Soon his imagery created curious worlds, cities and an internal universe, any record of which, beyond this suite of drawings, is hard to come by, if it exists. For reasons that are explored in the exhibitions accompanying essay, Why Kinshasa?, these worlds of wild energy and fantastical skyscrapers were a very important part of Congolese Culture.
This is a self taught artist whose inner-vision is, as is of ten the case amongst such creative people, described as a “gift of god”. These are his ‘lost drawings’; this suite has hitherto been unseen until this exhibition. There is a rawness in the act of drawing that is removed from the more refined paintings, shown here also. The work demonstrates an unselfconscious line and near automatic vigour in the drawings juxtaposed against a solid conception of finish and showmanship in the works on canvas which make it clear that Vancy indeed sees himself as an artist if he is still working today.