Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to present Stasis, a solo exhibition by Sadikou Oukpedjo.
After Anima and Silentium, two major exhibitions in the career of Sadikou Oukpedjo, the artist pursues here with Stasis a cycle of reflections and plastic experiments on the place of man in the world. The artist's view of our contemporary society is irrevocable: human beings have lost themselves in a senseless race for vanity and their scale of values is no longer as remarkable as the force of their violence.
For Sadikou Oukpedjo, this initial impulse, creator of collective senses, died out as man detached himself from his environment, keeping the imperatives of his soul and the needs of his body far from his reason. Rising by force and with force above nature, which he claims to submit to his good right, above the animals in the name of his progress and the supposed superiority of his spirit, man has become intoxicated with pride and excess.
Anima: breath, breathing. Soul, spirit, beginning. Throughout the ages and areas, myths have carried human consciousness. Rites, religions and beliefs were imagined, told, transmitted and rewritten to federate the social group around a common vision, bearer of peace and progress. In the face of the uncertain depths of the world, man, with these tales, never ceases to build up tools against the abyss, against the insurmountable idea of being nothing but subtle dust in the immensity of the cosmos, against the visceral rage to contemplate his imperfection and the duality of his being. Anima: breath, breathing. Sadikou Oukpedjo embodies this movement of life in his art. His technique is protean, evolutionary - engraving, painting, drawing, sculpture. The artist experiments with matter, often starting with raw elements such as coal, stone or pigments. In this material, he knows how to recognise the ally and the opponent: "all these elements that enter into practice in my creative phase speak to me and remind me that I am neither superior nor inferior to them, since they sometimes resist me and drive me into negotiation" he says. Finding inspiration in the harmony of things. Blending, hybridity as a path to elevation.
Silentium: absence of noise. Sadikou Oukpedjo's works always reign in a deathly silence imposed by the grandeur of his figures. The majestic canvases overhang you as you enter the space. The figures are powerful, the muscular bodies are those of mythological athletes, the smooth-skinned heads reveal skulls like sealed Pandora's boxes. And of course, the animals in the mix are animals of strength, both literal and symbolic, horses, oxen, gorillas, bulls. Strength makes us silent, we are silent in the face of so much strength. Then we listen in silence to the violence of what can no longer be told because it has been entirely exploited, consumed and usurped. It is the silence of a state of extreme mutation: the forms have changed, we have to look at length to know where one stops and where the form of the other begins: the centaur. From now on, the being is hybrid, the product of two entities which confront each other and which will never really be able to cohabit in a single container. Then the paint cracks, it bloats, in some places it folds, in others it relaxes. Sadikou Oukpedjo's technique is mimetic of his subject: hybrid of matter and mutating.
Stasis: internal conflict, political and moral crisis. Inertia. In Sadikou Oukpedjo's painting one must grasp the echo of a Nietzschean thought that is not named. For the philosopher as for the artist, man is a "maker of Gods". His will to believe is so powerful that it pushes him further and further in a nihilistic gesture that tends to privilege what is not to the detriment of what is; that pushes him to fight for the hypothetical love of an above, a beyond rather than for that of his neighbour. "There are more idols than realities in the world," said Nietzsche in the preface to Twilight of the Idols. These idols, money, consumption, religion, Sadikou Oukpedjo nails them to the pillory of painting, thus showing their power and their horror. These entities carried a system of values for man that some men themselves have misappropriated. "Humanity needs to create new tales to lead to gentler gods. Isn't it paradoxical that a God can base his reign on fear and exploitation? "asks the artist. Overcoming seduction, overcoming fear, getting out of inertia and making the pictorial space a place for the invention of new mythologies, such is Sadikou Oukpedjo's poetic enterprise.
