After the first part of the exhibition L’Esprit du large presented at the Cécile Fakhoury’ space in Dakar in the summer of 2019, the second part of the collective exhibition is now being held at the gallery in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. L’Esprit du large is an invitation to see far away, to decompartmentalize views and knowledge; an invitation to meetings at the crossroads. For this second chapter, the artists’ installations change scale and respond to their new in situ context. Playing on the inside/outside of the gallery, the height of the picture rails and the scale of the volumes, the works weave poetic links between them according to the artists’ imaginations and approach each other without imposed order to invite us to think about new itineraries.

Dimitri Fagbohoun exorcises the impact of history through the word “nigger”.

Dimitri Fagbohoun‘s rounded letters and soft neon light could make the object decorative if the word inscribed was not so heavy with history. The word “nigger” stands here as a familiar luminous sign, that of a trade in the era of contemporary globalization whose softened and polished forms could seduce, but whose background remains violent. Exorcise the weight of history by pronouncing the word – nigger – and making it a rich semantic tool for healing a contemporary identity. Dimitri Fagbohoun expresses a relationship with history in which his writing disturbs the models that constitute it.

Sadikou Oukpedjo explores the search for our deepest origins

Sadikou Oukpedjo draws from the myths of various cultures to give substance and substance to his anthropomorphic figures. The Nouvelles mythologies #11 and Untitled paintings are crossed by the invisible and its power, by the unknown and the hidden. Sadikou Oukpedjo is part of an approach that questions our deep origins, thus responding to the human need to access self-knowledge through multiple and ancestral attempts: cosmogony, rituals, witchcraft. The artist then becomes a magician, master, illusionist, scientist.

Ouattara Watts, beyond geographies and nationalities: the Cosmos?

Numbers, shapes, but also textures and fabrics make up Ouattara Watts‘ plastic language. Each of the artist’s paintings is a dynamic microcosm, a negative partition of the cultures that make up his universe: jazz music, African traditions and rituals, abbjad and Hebrew guematria numeration to name but a few of his influences. Door of the Cosmos #1 and #2, Farafina #2, and Untitled are visual and spiritual journeys. Ouattara Watts explores in his painting the intangible links that transcend geography and nationalities.

Dalila Dalléas Bouzar stages female forces imbued with mystical powers

Dalila Dalléas Bouzar‘s paintings impose themselves on us with the assurance of a choreography that is repeated a thousand times over. A ritual, incantatory or warlike parade, the power of the female body is chanted with force. The skies, prey to their own mood, overlook each of these silhouettes. They seem to be the extensions of these witch-warrior souls. The gestures of their choreography are the repositories of ancestral knowledge. Questioning in her practice the codes of representation in painting, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar has constantly reintroduced in her works the dissenting figures of a vernacular history.

Jems Koko Bi creates bridges between worlds at the borders of their separates

Continuing a constitutive reflection of Jems Koko Bi‘s work on notions of space and history, Retour is the vision of a positive exodus, free of the tragic stereotypes often associated with contemporary migration. The work is a procession to the house; to the walls built with our desires, hopes, and hands. Both sculptor and performer, Jems Koko Bi blends avant-garde influences with his resolutely African history. As a man who is a link between tradition and contemporary, Africa and Europe, Côte d’Ivoire and Germany, Jems Koko Bi practices an art of crossing and building bridges where worlds separate.

François-Xavier Gbré and the ambiguous remains of colonialism

The series of photographs taken by François-Xavier Gbré in Benin in 2012 celebrate, through his enigmatic images, the ambiguous power that a symbol of memory can take. The statue of Reconciliation in Cotonou, Benin, located on the esplanade of the Porte du Retour embodies the responsibility of states in triangular trade. Two similar statues exist throughout the world, in Liverpool in the United Kingdom and in Richmond in the United States, thus tracing a physical and symbolic geography through these three places. From colonial remains to landscapes modified by current events, François-Xavier Gbré explores territories and revisits history.

Yo-Yo Gonthier and memory erasure in the technology-oriented Western society

Burey Bambata (The Great Clouds) by Yo-Yo Gonthier is a collective ode to dream about. In this video, a visual epic shot with a Super 8 camera, Yo-Yo Gonthier brings together the whimsical dreams of an artist as a brilliant inventor and the semantic richness rooted in the history of vernacular customs that touch both the artist’s personal history and that of a part of Africa. He takes as his video protagonist the Cloud, this sculpture of fabric of several meters realized in 2013 and reactivated several times during performances whose preparation can be found in the photographs of notebooks and models. Plastic photographer Yo-Yo Gonthier questions the erasure of memory in a Western society where speed, progress and technology seem to be the essential values.

Vincent Michéa between West African musical nostalgia and personal stories

Vincent Michéa‘s paintings resonate within the gallery’s walls with the lively notes of Fax Clark and François Lougah. At the height of their career in the 1970s, these artists evoked a musical history at the crossroads of cultures. For several years, Vincent Michéa has been painting vinyl covers with acrylic paint. The artist has gradually built up a visual anthology of West African music, recording through the personal history of his encounters and affections for these musics, the more general history of a popular culture of which some parts have now disappeared.

L’esprit du large Chapter II

Group Show

Cécile Fakhoury Gallery – Abidjan

On view until 30th November 2019

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After having developed an artistic practice focused on sculpture and assemblages at a very young age, Sadikou Oukpedjo began to paint on the fringes of his work as a sculptor and then multiplied his experiments with techniques and supports. From cement paper to pastels, from the use of chalks to painting on canvas, he creates works of new dimensions, the drawing being both modelled in the manner of wood and considered as a medium in its own right.

From 2014, upon his return from the Dakar Biennale, he began a series of works, whose hybrid figures will be exhibited in his first solo exhibition, Anima, at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery in Abidjan in 2016. In Anima, Sadikou Oukpedjo presented a work on the human body, whose shaped forms testified to the physical and spiritual duality, half-man, half animal, of each of us. His works were intended to be a distorting, disturbing mirror to better reveal the essence of human life, that of a fragmented identity to be reinvented.

Sadikou Oukpedjo stands against silence through painting

When we look at Oukpedjo’s works, simple questions come to mind. However, these questions will prove to be more profound and even existential. Why all these animals? Why these hybrid characters, half human, half animal? Why nudity? How to understand it? Does the artist wish to expose human nature and reveal our most intimate contradictions? Why this strong hybridization between animals and humans in his compositions?

The paintings are raw, without detours, without aesthetic research at any cost. Complex and metaphorical. Large canvases in deep colours, speckled with picturesque, evanescent and even mythological characters. Oukpedjo’s compositions give a rupestrian, and even primitive, dimension to his works. A double presence of shapes and materials gives depth and light. In contrast to the darkness of the subjects treated. One, apparent, poultry (or a bird one cannot distinguish) in a cage as a head, on a human body, other hybrid characters remind us of centaurs from Greek mythologies except that here, these bodies are not half man, half horse but rather half human, half cattle animal or domesticated for their food consumption by humans (hens, guinea fowls, goats among others).

“The works created by Sadikou for the exhibition are really strong, and this Silentium series marks a milestone in the presentation of his work,” explains Francis Coraboeuf, curator at the Cécile Fakhoury gallery.

“The works are getting bigger and bigger without losing their intensity, his technique is still as powerful and delicate as ever. He conquers new territories: Sadikou is an intense creator, he devours the world, he uses every opportunity to assimilate techniques and knowledge, he is an artist in constant evolution, each exhibition, each work is the opportunity to appropriate a new territory, a technique not previously realized”.

Large canvases with deep colors that raise existential questions

Indeed, Oukpedjo’s paintings invite to philosophical reflections on the real human nature and the question of animality, like the two sides of the same coin. Embedded as if both – were – not without the other, each human possesses his animal in itself and both seem to fight to exist. What if each animal had a part of humanity in itself? If what defines mankind is consciousness and speech, then does the silence that results from the loss of previous attributes make the human being an animal? The artist invites us to hear the sound of silence, which he depicts as the new noise. He denounces an absence of sound, the contagion of an inner silence, silencing what should be said to others, but first to oneself. Which, by its violence, by its power, should be enough to break the wall of silence, the silence of our conscience. When the conscience is silent, man falls off his pedestal and loses the legitimacy of his superiority.

Some paintings feature accessories such as a gun held by a human body at the head of a guinea fowl, pointing at a man who seems to be begging for mercy. While on another painting, a new type of centaur – because the horse here is replaced by what appears to be an ox – offers a flower to a man who despises the look. The animals are presented in a naive innocence. Ready for sacrifice. The hybridization that seems sacrificial where it is not known which of the human or animal is sacrificed by the other in this incessant struggle.

The human condition: a universal discourse delivered by the artist

“In terms of discourse too, his message is increasingly strong and universal and when he speaks in this way of the human condition, of the suffering that man can inflict on man, I believe that many are touched in themselves.” says Francis.

Would the artist refer to the man who, devoured by his own animality and loss of consciousness, finds himself as described in the Leviathan of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who according to him, his life is lonely, destitute, disgusting, animal and brief?  In this way, man could not be distinguished from an animal. Homo Homini lupus est – Man is a wolf for man. Or is it the past of slavery and colonialism, a period during which man was treated like a – wild animal – to be domesticated at all costs or to be sacrificed?

Francis continues, “The series of works was produced in Abidjan for the exhibition. Before creating these works, he spent several months in residence at the Cité des Arts in Paris, then made a detour to Lomé where he created a monumental sculpture installation for the Palais de Lomé, which will soon open its doors. On the gallery side this is Sadikou’s second solo exhibition in Abidjan and we will soon publish his first (modest) catalogue to mark the event.”

A discussion on animals consumption?

Sadikou Oukpedjo’s work, (we do not know if this was the artist’s intention), could raise an increasingly controversial issue in our contemporary societies, namely the consumption of animals. Do animals feel emotions? Do they feel fear, danger, compassion? Does that make them more human ? If mankind becomes an animal by losing consciousness and speech, does that mean that animals would have a part of humanity if they felt emotions? The appearance in the canvases almost exclusively of animals consumed by man ready to be sacrificed, while the man appears as the executioner leads us to ask ourselves which of the man or animal is really the monster. A responsibility that echoes the silence of Sadikou Oukpedjo’s characters.

Silentium 
Second solo show of Sadikou Oukpedjo 
At the Cécile Fakhoury gallery
Exhibition to explore until 11th Mai 2019
Abidjan, Ivory Coast
www.cecilefakhoury.com

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