“I cannot do anything other than what I am; for me, Art must always draw from the living. This is why I feel close to the painting of Corneille or Alechinsky. "

John LIE A FO has always tasted engraving and screen printing, which he taught in The Hague, in very small prints so that each work carries within it a real part of its soul, the etching which gives its rare pieces great expressionist power. He tastes gouache on paper to depict the universe of childhood, his joyful dances color or communicate children, animals and tropical flowers. He finally tastes acrylic on canvas or on wood, for his strongest creations, which content, the Surinam war, the harshness of the life of the Haitian restavecs. He also embraces in his work the whole cosmology of Caribbean Creole cultures, voodoo cults, statuettes and rituals of purification of the Haitian populations or Nengue bushi, myths and shamanic cults of the Amerindian peoples.

His painting is cubist, his painting is CoBRA but his painting is also symbolist, spiritual and universal.

It offers an astonishing mixture characteristic of the cultures which found his personality, at the same time deeply rooted in the land of the Plateau of Guyanas, which he sometimes used, raw clay, but also emerging and bubbling from the ceaselessly renewed interbreeding of South American societies. but also of its eminently learned and European pictorial culture, nourished by the universes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Wifredo Lam, or Asger Jorn.

Often, in the eyes of the spectators, it seems to evoke Basquiat; it is true that culture and chronology bring them together, but where one describes the agonizing violence of the universe of urban mega-cities, Lie A Fo takes us into the living world, colorful, sometimes hypnotic, oh so powerful and populated by the spirits of the great Amazon forest.