At the beginning is a collection of sensitive materials, images, textures, shapes, colours that have for Vincent Michéa the dual power of symbols. First, sensitive materials that appeal to the senses: the crumpled, matte gold of Kubor’s wrapping paper that squeaks in your ear when you open it; the immaculate, shiny surface of photographic prints that invites you to grasp it with your hand full at the risk of leaving a few fingerprints; the infinitely varied pointillist weave that twists the viewer’s eye. From painting to photomontage, Vincent Michéa has always worked hand-to-hand with materials, in an intimate relationship with the plastic objects that the artist always chooses for what they evoke for him. Thus, these sensitive materials also appeal to memory. The photos that are at the origin of the works are as much those taken by Vincent Michéa as those he borrows from others, but all have in common the fact that they form a pantheon of memories that can be accessed between the lines.

The artist’s passions thus constitute his primary sources of inspiration: in the early 1980s, a decisive encounter with Senegal and its capital, which we find in the series 100% Dakar (2014); his affection for a black art scene from the late 1970s to the committed creativity he evokes in Or série (2015); and Fatou, the artist’s wife and muse, the main character in the series Fatou Pompidou (2017) and Fatou New Look – Pompidou Remix (2020).

Working within these meaningful materials, Vincent Michéa becomes an image sculptor. “I cut, I slice, I carve, I incise, I shear, I lacerate, I amputate, I decapitate, I dismember…” he explains about his first photomontages. In his works, the artist maintains a multiple-voice dialogue with the history of the genre and its emblematic figures that have marked the history of art from the second half of the 20th century to the present day.

From the extravagant derision of Dada Raoul Hausman, John Hartfield and Hanna Höche, Vincent Michéa keeps and perpetuates, in a joyfully irreverent spirit, a posture of rejection of aesthetic conventions. Thus, cultures mix, materials mix, the low and the noble are reversed, evoking in a more contemporary way the works of Romare Bearden or Mickalene Thomas, for example. The graphic construction of the images is in line with the work of a Roman Cieslewicz and often remains subversive in its connection to the code of representation. From these aesthetic interactions is born a visual poetry that is characterized by its forms and which translates Michea’s committed vision of the world.

Untangling the knots of the image to untangle the detours of history; recomposing the image to recompose memory, keeping the significant elements to signify other imaginaries, such is the aesthetic project that has guided the artist in his relationship to photomontage for the past ten years. Vincent Michéa thus transposes spaces and plural temporalities onto a contemporary territory and invites us to immerse ourselves in the multiple dimensions of his creations. From then on, for those who want to follow the main graphic lines of the artist’s narrative, stand the proponents of a personal story whose scope remains undeniably universal.

A table, scissors, glue and pictures in profusion, that’s the photo editor’s arsenal. Using photomontage as an artistic practice to design images allows you to “back-pedal”. It also means being aware that photography is an art and doubting oneself to produce it through this technique alone. Photomontage suddenly appears as an evidence, as an act of utmost significance, perfectly contemporary, adapted to the current context of an incessant flow of all forms of visual and plastic information. Photomontage requires a certain mastery of memory. Far from being an iconoclastic activity, it is rather an “animism of images”, a “polytheism of vision”. Conceiving and making photomontages manually with simple and common tools is one of the most meaningful acts for a creator who would like to realize sensitive images loaded with extreme tensions.

Toi Seulement

Vincent Michéa ‘solo exhibition

20 March – 8 May 2020

Galerie Cécile Fakhoury

Dakar – Senegal

The post Toi Seulement; a solo show of Vincent Michéa appeared first on Artskop.

Vincent Michéa is a lover of music and vinyl, especially the visual and graphic aspect of the album covers he reproduces. “I consider myself to be a ‘variété singer’, someone who knows how to sing everything from rock to funk, from folk to popular song“ says Michéa. Michéa’s choice of everyday subjects, his flat, brightly-coloured tones and his stylised treatment of scenes bring him close to Pop Art. Michéa co-founded the label 100% Dakar and worked in the DKR studio in the 90s.

“Some wonderful Senegalese or Congolese orchestras have this desire to know how to do everything, this willingness to play all the repertoires in the best possible way and I love that! That’s what I’m looking for in my work, something that’s easy to get hold of, something popular. I’m a variety painter who adapts his subject to his technique. I use very graphic codes, very visible in my collages, my painting and my marouflages of sheets of paper. I adapt my subject to my medium,” States the artist.

Vincent Michéa, who does not wish to associate his art with any political discourse, paints for those who are watching. His works are meant to awaken the senses and to “please” as he emphasizes. “I put things back into images that people are so used to seeing that they don’t see them any more,” he says, “Like album covers. It’s like Pop Art, where you revisit popular objects and give them to look at again by highlighting their graphic qualities or colours. In my street scenes, market scenes, the colours are cut, there is a stylisation of form and colour.”

After graduating from the Ecole Supérieure d’Arts Graphiques in Paris, Vincent Michéa left in 1986 to work as a graphic designer in Dakar, at the time of Afro-pop cinema and the precursors of African rap. His training as a graphic designer inked in him the importance of form to the point that it became the heart of his research. “You learn drawing by starting with the nude to have a notion of composition, more than mastery or anatomy. I trained as a graphic designer and in typography the white of the letter is as important as the printed black, it’s the form and the counter-form. The eye circulates and it has to be comfortable to read or look at. Mastering typography helps me to compose my paintings. Painting must be pleasant to read,” insists the painter. His work conveys a nostalgic and glamorous images of Dakar, with its modernist architecture, the abundance of its past music scene, its flowers that cover everything and its local life.

In 1987 Vincent Michéa exhibited his work for the first time at the Galerie Nationale du Sénégal. Between 1988 and 1991, he returns to Paris and works with Roman Cieslewicz, a major Polish artist of the graphic scene. Encouraged by this renowned graphic designer, he reinforces his interest in printed things and printing techniques. In 2007 he runs photomontage workshops at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa and from the following year he takes charge of the silkscreen workshop at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels in Marrakech. Vincent lives and works between Paris and Dakar.

VARIÉTÉ

Vincent Michéa at Magnin-A Gallery until 1st February 2020

Opening on Saturday, December 7, 2019, from 2 to 8 p.m.

Magnin-A Gallery

118, Boulevard Richard Lenoir, 75011 – Paris

The post Vincent Michéa in Variety appeared first on Artskop.

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

The post L’esprit du large II appeared first on Artskop.