Héritier Bilaka is a Canadian painter based in Ottawa. He obtained his first diploma in visual arts in 2007 from Academy of Fine Arts of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a Bachelor of Visual Arts Magna Cum Laude from the University of Ottawa in 2023, as well as a scholarship and a certificate of recognition for the quality of body work from the Dean of Faculty of Arts at  University of Ottawa. He has participated in numerous physical and virtual group exhibitions in cities such as Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, London UK, Cannes, France and New York. Some of his works are in permanent collection of Maron'Ages art gallery in Lyon, France and in private collections in Ancona, Italy, Australia and Ottawa. Heritier Bilaka was among winners of the City of Ottawa's Equity and Inclusion in the Arts Fund - Seed Award 2023. He was artist-in-residence in 2023 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick. Appointed a jury member for the 2023 Ontario Arts Council's Francophone artist-run center projects, he also signed a two-year agreement with the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, as part of his artistic research. He was among the French-speaking winners of the Ontario Arts Council's Research and Creation grant in 2022. His works and television interviews have been published in articles and magazines in Canada and abroad.

Impacted by political, social and historical problems in my native country, I explore human condition in its soci0o-political, historical and spiritual dimensions linked to environmental space through the representation of nude body as a reflection of Bantu identity and paradigm in a figurative style. My interest in figuration stems from the fact that it seems more immediately accessible to the large audience. Working with live models, expresses the real presence of bodies that impose themselves and at the same time undergo a certain conditioning and vulnerability through the circumstance and space in which they are confronted. In this way, my work no longer appears as a simple mimetic representation, but rather as part of a reality made accessible to viewers. I use academic technics combined with a contemporary approach to create an interplay between the past and the present, where the traditional and the contemporary complement and challenge each other.

I believe that the act of painting is not only a language, but also another way of marking a presence in history. Inspired by black-and-white photography, my intention to paint black-and-white characters in a multicolored environment is linked to expressing the idea of dialogue between past and present, historical in contemporary context. For some time now, I have been depicting heads of my characters as black silhouettes, eliminating any human faces. It is a way of questioning individualism and its effects in contemporary societies, and of opening up the possibility for the large audience's imagination. The idea is to create a mirror effect between the audience and its environment, to question and open up a conversation.