Serafim Segunda Yssolo:
Scraps and Memories

82 Parris Gallery, Portland, Maine | August 7, 2026 – August 28, 2026

In Scraps and Memories, Yssolo invites us on a journey through matter, memory, and ancestry, where painting and remnants become a language of resistance, spirituality, and human reconstruction. The exhibition emerges from the philosophy of Life on Scraps, a deeply personal inquiry into dignity, beauty, and transcendence within what the world has learned to overlook.

Through paintings on canvas and works constructed from reclaimed materials, the artist reconnects us with what continues to live beneath the debris of time: invisible memories, interrupted affections, ancestral spiritualities, and fragments of humanity still pulsing in silence. Here, scraps become emotional experiences, inherited silences, interrupted stories, and forgotten parts of ourselves.

For not all remnants belong to objects. Some survive only in memory.

One of these fragments returns through a tribute commemorating the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth. Here she appears not as a cinematic icon, but as memory. During Yssolo’s childhood, amid Angola’s civil war, one of the few belongings he carried was his mother’s blouse bearing Marilyn’s smiling portrait. That smile became a silent refuge. Decades later it returns, not as celebrity, but as the trace of a memory that refused to disappear. Sometimes what saves a child is neither a monument nor a certainty. Sometimes it is simply an image that continues to smile while the world is falling apart.

At the heart of this exhibition lives another childhood memory: the symbolic power of African names. Kamena speaks of healing. Lemba calls for gentleness and peace. Zolana becomes an invitation to compassion and collective care.

Memory does not belong to the past.
It shapes the present.
It is permanence.
It is living inheritance.

Yssolo’s works inhabit the threshold where ruin and rebirth coexist. Matter becomes testimony, and painting becomes a place of restoration.

Scraps and Memories does not seek to answer the wounds of existence. It seeks to listen to them.

What refuses to disappear, even after everything else has been reduced to ruins?

Serafim Segunda Yssolo

Yssolo (Serafim Yssolo, born September 17, 1992, in Kuito, Angola) is a self-taught multidisciplinary visual artist and member of the National Union of Plastic Artists of Angola (UNAP). Formerly known as Serafim Serlon, he officially adopted the artistic name Yssolo in 2021, marking a significant conceptual and aesthetic evolution in his artistic practice.

His work spans painting, muralism, sculpture, and installation, through which he has developed a singular visual language rooted in memory, ancestry, African spirituality, and social transformation. His artistic inquiry examines the interconnectedness between humanity, nature, and the material and emotional traces of time, offering reflections on identity, belonging, and renewal.

Through his artistic philosophy and series “Life on Scraps”, Yssolo re-signifies discarded materials and fragments of lived experience as symbolic vessels of memory, resilience, and reconstruction. His practice bridges tradition and contemporaneity, integrating African cultural references into a contemporary visual language marked by gesture, materiality, and spiritual depth.

For Yssolo, art represents a sacred space where matter, memory, and transcendence converge, allowing what is often perceived as disposable to acquire new meaning and purpose. His artistic research engages themes of inner freedom, self-awareness, emotional restoration, and the evolving relationship between individuals and their environments.

Since 2010, Yssolo has regularly participated in solo and group exhibitions, artistic residencies, and public art initiatives across Angola, Portugal, and the United States. His professional trajectory includes exhibitions in prominent galleries, international festivals, and institutional and community-based artistic interventions.

Among his notable solo exhibitions are “Life on Scraps” (Galeria Escom, Luanda, 2017), “Force of Nature” (Galeria Tamar Golan, Luanda, 2018), “False Profile” (Lubango, Angola, 2019), and “Perfume of the Wind” (Galeria CELAMAR, Luanda, 2019). In 2024, he presented the solo exhibition “Life on Scraps” at L/A Arts Gallery in Lewiston, Maine, expanding his international artistic presence.

His exhibition history in the United States includes participation in Yellow Exhibit (Munka Studio, Lewiston, Maine, 2023), The Reveals Exhibit (Munka Studio, 2023), Muzongue II (Afrotaste Restaurant, 2023), and Gala Muxima – The Weekender (Boston, Massachusetts, 2023), in addition to live painting performances in several editions of Artwalk in Maine.

In 2024, Yssolo joined the artist residency program at Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine, further deepening his artistic research and contemporary practice.

In the field of muralism and public art, Yssolo has carried out artistic interventions in both Angola and the United States. In Angola, he collaborated with institutions such as TV Zimbo, CCB, CIPRO, ZAP Studios, and Televisão Pública de Angola (TPA). In the United States, he developed mural projects including “Welcome to Geiger’s Garden” at Geiger Elementary School (Lewiston, Maine, 2024), “Urban Symphony” at Lionel Potvin Park (Lewiston, Maine, 2026), and “Maine’s Heart” at Central Maine Healthcare Pediatrics (Lewiston, Maine, 2026), conceived to foster environments of welcome, imagination, and hope in pediatric settings.

In 2017, he was nominated for Visual Artist of the Year at the Jovens da Banda Awards in Luanda.

Currently, Yssolo maintains an international artistic practice spanning exhibitions, muralism, sculpture, and visual research, continuing to develop an authorial language deeply informed by spirituality, collective memory, African ancestry, and the transformative potential of materiality.