The concept of home means different things to different people and this is what young Cameroonian, Salomon Moneyang, seeks to explore in Eto y’a Nda-bot: Intimate Interiors.

Showing at Rele Gallery, Moneyang, in tracing his return to his ancestral home in Cameroon through deeply intimate watercolours and bold acrylic paintings on canvas; evokes long often-buried memories and what familial life and home means to him and to viewers.

The artist, in his second solo show ever, but first in Lagos, Nigeria, said he started painting seriously in 2019 but the love of drawing has always been with him since he was a child.

A graduate of art from his hometown university in Cameroon, he said art is his life blood. “My first exhibition in 2023, titled, Remembrance (also about memories), was great, people started recognising me and appreciating my style of art,” he reminisced.

His works capture the emotional weight of domestic life – its tenderness, silences and contradictions. Moving between the rural and the urban, the remembered and the lived, Moneyang stages the domestic interior as a place of complex care and quiet tension. In attending to the home as a Black male artist, he shifts our understanding of masculinity, placing it within the realm of vulnerability, observation and familial presence.

One of his pieces, the largest, Residence La Concord, depicts the simple, routine, daily life of a family. “This could be a meeting between family members, they could be eating, having a serious conversation or anything the viewers want to interpret it as basically.”

Drawing inspiration from the time spent in his aunt’s home, he said this body of work was from the time spent in his village when he moved from the city. “I moved there because I wanted inspiration, a new experience. When I moved there, this particular series came to me. Everything in this body of work is recreated from the time I spent there. My work is mainly memories that impact me and I often tend to recreate that,” he said.

Looking to the future, which he cannot predict, he said, “after this, when I get back to Cameroon, I will try to feel a new experience that will help me create a new body of work. Before creating anything, I need to feel it, I need to be ‘shocked’ by something. I move with the wind, with the air and it helps breathe creativity into me.”

The Cameroonian said his style of art was inspired by Asian art. “This style of art is not very common in our side of the world. I was also inspired by another local artist in my country who works with watercolour on canvas. I connected with his works; it inspired me to start painting like this. In the past, I used to work on paper like Asian artists but after seeing him working with water colour on canvas, I was convinced to move from paper.” He said this particular body of work took him a couple of months to create but started thinking about it from November last year.

“The thought process and bringing it to life took me about six months in total. I don’t know what the future holds for me yet but I need to feel something before I create but once I do, the possibilities are endless,” he said.