Carl-Edouard Keïta was born in 1992 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He now lives and works between New York and Abidjan.
Carl-Edouard Keïta's aesthetic unfolds at the crossroads of influences, borrowing as much from the constructivist and cubist movements as from African primitive art or jazz. With the lead of the pencil, the artist endeavours to document our globalised society in perpetual evolution, through the sophistication of his drawing composed of geometric forms which, although simple, once assembled reveal a great mastery of lines, curves and the play of light.
This mixture of references that the artist appropriates and reinterprets with brio to create his own universe echoes Paul Gilroy's notion of the "Black Atlantic". In his eponymous book, the theorist conceives the idea of an Atlantic Ocean as a network of cultural pollination and exchange flows between continents.
Keïta's drawings show a great mastery of composition, each work carrying a story, a narrative. The decomposition of the bodies of the represented figures into several geometrically shaped elements can be understood as mimetic of a movement of unveiling and deconstruction of the subjects addressed in his works, from the visible to the hidden.
Inspired amongst other things by the teeming creativity of the cabarets of the 1920s in France, where a number of black performers made their mark on history through the audacity and radical novelty of their creations, Carl-Edouard Keïta's works question the division of our heritage between tradition and modernity, between Africa and Europe.