Assoukrou Aké is a multidisciplinary artist who freely explores different plastic forms, from installation to sculpture, including engraving and textile works, in order to elaborate what he calls ‘a healing narrative’.
By confronting his personal history with ‘the great history’, Assoukrou is interested in what links them, trying to look at the shadowy parts of the collective history in an empathetic and distanced way, in order to go beyond the singularities of each person to reach a mixed critical space where the fragments of individual lives could make sense again and create new solidarities.
Assoukrou Aké’s universe is made up of multiple references, mixing African mythology and Enlightenment iconography, sacred allegories, classical European literature, profane rites and press photography. The anonymous human figure with a face made of spirals, which evokes both a fictional character and the symbolic materialization of a genealogy, like tree rings, is found on several occasions. The horse is also very present in Assoukrou’s works, especially his engravings. It often embodies a tragic dimension, creates an atmosphere of grandeur and evokes epics, great adventures, conquests - or their failure.
Through the plastic repetition of traditional or classical forms and the subversion of contexts and hierarchies of matter, Assoukrou Aké ultimately composes an art of translation, of transposition, in order to be able to confront the mutations of violence and invent a new common language, discovering the world and the responses that are intrinsic to it.