Projects and exhibitions

Through the summer Lamothe painted directly onto the walls of a private apartment in Paris, commissioned by its owner. No canvas, no frame, no way to take the work off the wall and hang it somewhere else: the painting and the building are now the same object.

The stairwell carries a single tall figure in blue that follows the run of the steps. In the main room five bands of colour, purple, black, yellow, red and turquoise, stand behind three dancing figures, with plants drawn in white along the bottom edge. Outside, on a curved wall, two dancers in white move across a red field.

It is the closest the work has come to where it started. The surfaces are large, fixed in place and seen by whoever walks past them, which is how he painted before any gallery was involved.

Almost thirty years later he has gone back to the idea, this time on Levi's denim. Each jacket is painted by hand, so no two leave the studio alike: one is a grid of colour blocks across the back, another carries the same figures and eyes that run through the paintings.

The logic has not changed since the subway. A painting on a wall waits for people to come to it. A painting on a jacket goes to work, gets rained on, and turns whoever is wearing it into the exhibition.

Galerie SLP showed Lamothe in Berlin for Black History Month, alongside Kat Pablo, Pedro Knife and Martin Dreves Castillo. Admission was free and the gallery stayed open six days a week, which fits the work: these are paintings that were built to be seen by people walking past, not by appointment.

Among the pieces on show was The Skeleton, one of the recent canvases. It carries the two habits that run through everything he paints, a heavy black outline and flat colour laid down without shading, here on a red ground under a green sky.

The Royal Academy has held its Summer Exhibition every year since 1769, without interruption. The 253rd edition was coordinated by Yinka Shonibare RA under the theme Reclaiming Magic and gathered more than 1,300 works; the Academy listed Lamothe among the self-taught artists in the show. His painting WOW, acrylic marker and acrylic on paper, 65 by 100 cm, was one of four works chosen for the official exhibition posters.

That is the short version of a long arc: a painter who started on subway cars, printed at poster size for an institution that has been running longer than most countries have had their current borders.

1-54 takes its name from the one continent and fifty-four countries it covers, and its London edition runs at Somerset House. Lamothe was shown there by the October Gallery, which has exhibited his work in London since 1997.