Prosper Aluu is a Nigerian painter and multidisciplinary artist whose practice centres on Abfillage, a self-defined method that brings abstraction, figuration, and collage into a single visual language. Working with newspaper clippings, paint, and expressive human forms, Aluu constructs layered compositions that examine African identity, cultural memory, collective dignity, and the histories carried by materials from everyday life.

The newspaper is central to this practice. Rather than functioning as texture or background, it enters the work as an archive, bringing its headlines, photographs, fragments of public record, and accumulated narratives into contact with painted figures. Aluu places present bodies against these existing records, creating a tension between what has been documented and how people choose to represent themselves. The material therefore carries a history before the painting begins, and the act of painting across it becomes a way of intervening in that history without erasing it.

This intervention is particularly visible in Aluu’s treatment of the human figure. His elongated subjects, often marked by Afro hairstyles and crowned in gold, occupy the composition with a deliberate sense of presence. The Afro is not simply a recurring visual motif, and the gold crown is not merely ornamental; together they establish a vocabulary of dignity, self-possession, and visibility. The figures claim space within surfaces already occupied by other narratives, shifting the newspaper from a record of what has happened into a ground on which another kind of history can be asserted.

Photo Credit: Prosper Aluu

There is also a structural intelligence beneath the expressive quality of the work. Trained in Building Technology and Design at the Federal University of Technology Owerri, Aluu approaches composition through an understanding of space, balance, layering, and tension. The relationship between flat newsprint and painted depth, between fragmented information and coherent figures, gives the works an architectural logic that holds their competing elements together. His compositions are crowded with material, but they are not without order; each layer contributes to how the image is built and where the viewer’s attention settles.

Since committing to full-time studio practice in 2017, Aluu’s trajectory has developed through exhibitions, residencies, and recognition across Nigeria and internationally. His Peace Poster Award at his first official exhibition in 2018, a 2020 brand ambassador role with TECNO Mobile Nigeria, a residency at Villa Karo in Benin, and his 2024 shortlist for the Kuenyehia Prize for Contemporary African Art mark different stages in an expanding practice. His work has since been exhibited across Nigeria, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Japan, placing Abfillage within wider conversations around collage, figuration, and contemporary African art while retaining its grounding in Aluu’s own visual and cultural vocabulary.

What makes the practice significant is not simply the invention of a term or the combination of materials. Abfillage proposes that the surfaces surrounding us already contain histories, and that those histories can be interrupted, layered, and reconsidered. Aluu treats the newspaper as both evidence and material, and the figure as both subject and assertion. In doing so, his paintings ask what remains in the objects that record ordinary life, whose stories those objects preserve, and what becomes possible when an artist paints directly into the record rather than beginning with an empty surface.