Ndunde’s drawings straddle the precarious lines between art historical formalism —making reference to rigidity and structure in form— as well as experimentation. This balance between a drawing out from art history and his own interpretation allows the work space to breathe, where each gesture becomes an emblem for full expression.  

The spine along which his practice is built is bound by two core principles; distillation and repetition where fracture, fragmentation and reconstruction result in totality. He succeeds in extracting the most essential aspects of form through a process of repetition and layering.

Ndunde notes; “In my creative process, I break things down with the intent of focusing on the most important aspect each piece conveys. The first break-down is decluttering the composition as a whole where I intentionally use negative space.” He elaborates; “I have to be repetitive with my line drawing technique. The process is purely layering strokes of lines until form is achieved. It is simple but labour intensive.”

Ndunde’s artistic practice can be read through medium, materials as well as technique, all of which make visible a sensibility that is drawn to clarity and compositional balance. Line and shadow are used to create fractured and disassembled figures with a suggestion towards cubism, particularly through the use of light, tone as well as a reduction of colour to a single hue at a time where reds, greens, blues and greys assert themselves against negative space.

The use of ballpoint pen ink adds to the reading of his work while also frustrating art historical readings of his work. This is particularly because the work lies within existing traditions of experimentation pioneered on by a long line and lineage of artists who continued to reject and complicate clear readings of art as purely painting and/or sculpture.

One such example is Korean-American artist Il Lee, who since the 1970s, has engaged in ballpoint inks to create large scale abstract work. Il Lee’s ballpoint ink drawings challenged and stretched both mediums of painting and drawing. Speaking on the ballpoint art of Il Lee, author Trent Morse points to him (alongside artists Alighiero Boetti and Jan Fabre) as the godfather of an intense study of new forms of art-making devices. In the same light, Ndunde’s art not only contributes to the medium of drawing but also challenges it. 

Ndunde’s drawings resist allegorical readings and empty out overt symbolism. This emptying out of symbols leaves behind interesting structural images—aerobic and acrobatic figures that emerge, leap, bend, reach and land. They seductively root themselves between edges; at once uniform and intelligible while also remaining complex, elusive and opaque. 

Viewed as deliberate sequences and arrangement of lines, Ndude’s figures are structured and controlled and yet they are still able to achieve a calming effect through musicality and rhythm. Perhaps this effect mirrors the artists own mental state when producing the work where regularity and reoccurrence result in mental ease.

Ndunde notes; “I get similar sentiments over time. Some presentations come naturally as I look at things such as how we take on fear subconsciously and consciously”. This is once again evident in how he chooses to title the works; Reach, Flight, Landing, Progression and Emergence—speaking to the psychological and physiological cycles of learning, achieving, moving, hoping, resting, dreaming and letting go. 

What is interesting and perhaps even exciting is when artists are able to create outside of existing constraints and expectations of what art is or should be—that is to say, the ability to draw on old traditions while also being able to innovate and offer a full expression. This kind of unrestrained and unconstrained back and forth is what creates a meaningful dialogue between history, heritage and modern notions of art and art-making. 

Peteros Ndunde’s works will be presented on June 24th at the PIASA auction dedicated to contemporary African art. In exclusivity and before this important auction Artskop3437 proposes you a selection of the artist’s drawings.

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This new edition of DDESSINPARIS fair confirms the major role of the event: to be a springboard for the young artistic scene working on drawing in all its forms, and for the galleries that defend it, in France and abroad. By giving it a high profile, alongside more established galleries and artists, DDESSINPARIS contributes to making known and recognising an artistic scene of the future, which energises and passionately irrigates this medium. The event thus remains faithful to its vocation to support, promote and accompany the young actors of tomorrow’s drawing. As a major partner of the actors of the art world, DDESSIN{20} will once again offer professionals, collectors and amateurs, a moment rich in discoveries, in a luminous setting and a friendly atmosphere.

DDESSIN{20} will host about twenty French and foreign galleries, solo shows, an artists’ nursery, and the DDESSIN{20} “coup de coeur”, as well as many specific projects, and will see the awarding of the DDESSIN{20} prize.

The fair, which is open to artists from around the world and from France, is also a significant demonstration of its commitment to giving greater visibility to artists from the African continent. Among the artists related to the African art scene and presented for this 2020 edition of the fair: Nú BARRETO, Diane VICTOR, Samuel N’Gabo Zimmer, Smaïl Kanouté, Dany Leriche, Emmanuel Azizeh, Peteros Ndunde, Thilleli Rahmoun, Emory Douglas, Tahar Ben Jelloun, …

Three solo shows of artists related to the African continent.

Danny Leriche

For this first participation of Dany Leriche, DDESSINPARIS presents the work of an artist without borders or barriers, who will exhibit the drawings from her series “Quest for a Utopian Elsewhere”. Dany Leriche lives and works between France and Mali. A multimedia artist, she uses drawing as well as installation, sculpture and photography.

According to Lolita M’Gouni, “Dany Leriche is one of those dream-makers from another time. A prolific conqueror, traveller and generous. One would imagine her as Rénénoutet or divine Pythia, officiating in a travelling laboratory, where the pleasures of experience and discovery would be associated with the rigour of a work every day renewed. When she is not in Greece, Cuba, Mali, or Dogon country, Dany appears where we did not necessarily expect her, and offers us her fragments of dreams, composite parcels of a fertile imagination.”

Since 2006, the artist has been travelling regularly to West Africa. Poverty and climatic hostility, which are the daily lot of Africans, push thousands of them to emigrate. This is what the artist wanted to present in the series of drawings “Quest for a Utopian Elsewhere”. Dany Leriche has worked and exhibited in many countries around the world, where she has been part of prestigious public and private collections. Among the institutions that have acquired a work by Dany Leriche are the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, the Miniature Museum of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam, and the African Culture Fund (ACF).

Thilleli Rahmoun

For this first participation of the Algerian artist Thilleli Rahmoun, DDESSINPARIS proposes a series of drawings that disturb perceptions, in order to awaken in the viewer a reflection on the relationship that contemporary man has with the outside world. Thilleli Rahmoun was born in Alger in 1978. She graduated in 2007 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and since 2001 from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Alger. She has won several painting prizes, including the Fondation Villa Seurat prize in 2018, under the aegis of the Fondation de France. In 2019, she carried out a fresco project with the young people of the La Cruz neighbourhood in Medellin, Colombia, in partnership with the Villa Seurat Foundation for Contemporary Art, under the aegis of the Fondation de France and the association Grandir Ensemble.

Thilleli Rahmoun has worked for a long time on sensual but uninhabitable spaces, places of life despite the constraints they imply – the presence of incongruous objects, the difficulty of moving around in them. By observing his drawings, the viewer wonders which element is not in his natural environment, but which continues to exist to disturb his reading of the proposed scene.

The artist represents twisted stories, which she places at the heart of dramatized productions, bringing together strong visions in this subtle play, within “passing” places and fictitious spaces. The evocations are numerous, especially those related to frustrated energy. The fragile protagonists are thrown into the arms of a closed world, both witnesses and indifferent judges of their captivity. Thilleli Rahmoun’s work has been the subject of an e-book published by Tribew, which will be presented on a digital tablet on the occasion of DDESSIN {20}.

Smaïl Kanouté

Smaïl Kanouté is an artist who is part of this young generation constantly renewing the visual and aesthetic codes of all disciplines. Passionate about the motif, the universe of manga and African textile motifs, the artist uses them to open a pictorial and cutural dialogue. Smaïl Kanouté is a multi-faceted artist who graduated from ENSAD in 2012. He is a graphic designer, screen-printer, visual artist and professional dancer. Interdisciplinarity is Smaïl Kanouté’s leitmotiv. Dance and graphic design are inseparable in his creative process which is nourished by artistic and cultural crossbreeding. Pattern is the basis of his research and of each of his creations because for him everything is a question of lines, curves, rhythms, emotions and colours. His graphic and scenic researches are also nourished by the question of the identity quest, getting closer to the Afrofuturist movement. He claims to be open to the unknown in order to better discover his true self. It is a kind of initiatory journey that nourishes his creative process: to know oneself better, one must look in the mirror that the other hands out to us.

Smaïl kanouté exhibited at the BZZ Gallery at 104. He collaborates, within the framework of artistic projects and performances, with the artists Tino Seghal, Philippe Baudelocque, Antonin Fourneau and Evans Mbugua. He has just received several awards related to his short film work (Urban Film Festival, Dance on Screen), his drawings have been selected by the Ateliers Médicis for their graphic identity and his work will soon be presented in a collective exhibition at the CENTQUATRE, HERE, and at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

Samuel N’Gabo Zimmer, a favorite of DDessin{20}

Eve de Medeiros, founder and director of DDESSINPARIS, has chosen the artist Samuel N’Gabo Zimmer for the Salon DDESSIN {20}. Samuel N’Gabo Zimmer, a French-Rwandan artist born in 1986 in Rwanda, now lives and works in Ornans. This self-taught artist strives to transmit through drawing his attachment to nature, and to trees in particular, which form the central motif of his evolving work. It is in the image of their creator, who is steeped in intertwined cultures, that the trees he draws unfold their roots with strength and proudly erect a fertile interlacing of branches, which can be seen as so many paths and stories. For the shapes that he weaves with the pen, brush or pencil, leave the viewer completely free to appropriate them and to wander through the story, both universal and particular, that each tree tells.

Madeleine Filippi, art critic and art historian, member of AICA, describes his work in the following terms: “A former pruner, Rwandan Samuel N’Gabo Zimmer admits that he has had a passion for drawing since his training in botany. Self-taught, for him it is at first a mnemonic process, a language in its own right, in which each plant element takes its place in a grammar. From his native Rwanda to Besançon, plants and vegetal elements have never ceased to inspire him. The cotton flower, first of all for its symbolism, but also for its physical properties, comes back like a red thread in the artist’s work. Far from the usual clichés and discourses on pan-Africanism, Samuel N’Gabo Zimmer subtly appropriates the cotton flower. Whether they appear in a very figurative manner or less obviously in the form of vegetable fibres, these drawn propositions cleverly explore a paragon of “anchoring”.

Artskop3437 special project for DDessin{20}

On the occasion of DDESSIN {20}, Artskop3437 is setting up for the first time a unique special project presenting three contemporary artists from the African continent. A specific collaboration format allowing young emerging artists, such as Peteros Ndunde (Nairobi, Kenya), to have a chance to be present on an international market.

The choice of internationally renowned artists Diane Victor and Nú Barreto allows Peteros Ndunde to engage in a dialogue with the works of established artists present in the collections of numerous public and private institutions. A dialogue built around a common denominator, that of exploring human emotions and behaviours from a variety of perspectives.

Artskop3437 joins forces with Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris, Brussels) for this event and presents a selection of new works by the artist Nú Barreto. Nú Barreto was born in 1966, in São Domingos, Guinea Bissau but he has been living in Paris since 1989. He draws attention to the many scourges such as poverty, suffering, discrimination, that are rampant on the African Continent through the use of strong symbols expressed in forms, colors and motifs. His mixed technics, unites drawing, collage, recycling integrates the spectator into the artistic process through the use of painting, photography, drawing and video. His works traveled the world (Germany, Brazil, China, Spain, France, Macao, Portugal, Senegal). His talent and works are internationally recognized since his First exhibitions in 1997.

Alongside Nú Barreto, and Peteros Ndunde, Artskop3437 will present, in collaboration with the Atelier le Grand Village, drawings by the renowned artist Diane Victor, including a masterpiece: an ash drawing titled Mother and Daughter. Victor positions herself within the South African and international art scene through her bold confrontations with difficult and at times taboo subject matter. Her large scale drawings and etchings demonstrate a command of mark-making, which she uses to render her subjects in affecting detail. At times, her work seems to pose challenges to social and political life in contemporary South Africa, considering issues of corruption, violence and an unequal power distribution. It will be the very first time the artist will be presented in an art Fair in France.

Artskop3437 does not intend to be an art gallery but proposes, within the framework of unique specific collaborations, to present the work of a selection of contemporary artists linked to the African continent, on the occasion of international art fairs and ephemeral exhibitions. The aim of this special project is to offer these artists a better exposure, as well as an easier access to the international art market.

DDessin{20}

From September 18th to 20th, 2020

Atelier Richelieu

60, rue de Richelieu

75002 Paris

www.ddessinparis.com

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