François-Xavier Gbré

Cour Suprême I, Palais de Justice, CAP manuel, Dakar, 2014

Limited edition

Pigment print on Baryta Hahnemühle paper

CM H 100 W 150

IN H 39.37 W 59.06

Certificate of authenticity

Available

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About the work

Cour Suprême I, Palais de Justice, CAP manuel, Dakar, 2014

François-Xavier Gbré explores territories. In connection with time and geography, his work calls upon the language of architecture as witness of memory and social changes.
Colonial remains with redefined landscapes. Through current events, he explores territories and revisits history. He is interested in the course, which life restlessly takes before his eyes. Shot after shot, he questions his shifting world.

Each image naturally ties to another. Each new composition falls within the extension of a previous one. The search for simplicity is at the core of his work, which brings out the essentials. In the urban confusion, where we sometimes get lost, and throughout his works, the question of our lifestyles, our social interactions and our relation to History, is raised on a local scale, as an echo of universal expression. On a deeper level, the artist shares with us questions regarding his identity. Highly evocative, his images are similar to a tale or a fable, while their rhythm, like prose, is close to free writing.

About artist

François-Xavier Gbré

Living and working between France and Ivory Coast, this mixed-race Ivorian artist, who grew up in the North of France, faces Côte d'Ivoire's change, economic growth, great urban expansion, and above all vestiges. Step by step, François-Xavier Gbré creates a landscape of his own through a collection of photographs, which reveal hidden aspects of everyday life.

The past in Gbré's photographs is foreign and unfinished. United by a methodical, often distanced perspective on architecture and landscape as a form of documentary evidence, his work recalls the landmark photography of Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, and Guy Tillim.

From Mali to Israel, from Lille to Rabat, he photographs abandoned constructions that bear the traces of the social and political history of their country. François-Xavier Gbré's photographs cast a detached eye on these buildings and the symbolic weight that nations lay upon them.

With his series Tracks, started in 2009, he deals with the symbolism of once-valorized objects, now left behind. His images of interior scenes and the surfaces of abandoned buildings constructed during the colonial era or at the moment of independence sustain an examination of aesthetic and sociopolitical forces on architecture. With a soft radicality, he testifies of an interval, of those swinging moments intensely revealed by architecture.

With a sensibility that is deeply engaged in recording the state of the world and partaking in it through photography, François-Xavier Gbré's photographs reveal a passing, a track. The unexpected objec...

About Gallery

Galerie Cécile Fakhoury

Galerie Cécile Fakhoury opened its doors in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in September 2012. In May, 2018 the gallery inaugurated second space in Dakar, Senegal and a showroom in Paris in France.

The gallery aims at promoting contemporary art in Africa. It offers visibility to creativity and contemporary artistic diversity in Africa through its programming of solo shows and group exhibitions, participation in international art fairs and biennales, and through its collaboration with foreign galleries.

Strongly rooted in their respective identities and stories, the artists represented by the gallery distinguish themselves through the use of a language that abolishes barriers and rejects geographical stigmatisation. Observers of a world they live in, these artists take an enlightened and critical look at our society. The diversity of their aesthetic gestures, committed positions to grab the complexity of History, participates in the writing of a living memory and asks us to reconsider our own relation to the world.

Cécile Fakhoury Abidjan
Boulevard Latrille
Between Carrefour de la Vie and le carrefour de la RTI
Between Sodemi and Immeuble Carbone
Cocody
Abidjan - Ivory Coast

Cécile Fakhoury Dakar
Rue Carnot x Béranger Féraud
Behind, Hotel Pullman
Plateau
BP 23402
Dakar - Sénégal