At the beginning of Vincent Michéa's work is a collection of sensitive materials - images, textures, shapes and colours - which have for the artist the double force of symbols. In his works, the artist reveals something of his inner landscape, of a unique plurality, ranging from France to Dakar, his adopted city, passing through multiple real or symbolic spaces that he surveys through sounds, forms and colours and that do not care about the rules of geography. In his works, Michéa invites us to travel through this plural place that he carries within himself and to enrich it with the echoes that our presence could create there.
Vincent Michéa paints what he likes, without concession, without worrying about what might be expected of him. The artist paints Dakar as Nougaro sang Toulouse, and in this he is a painter of variety with a disconcerting freedom, a painter of the picturesque, in the primary sense of the term: what deserves to be painted. Michéa does not give this merit according to scales of value that are external to him, but in relation to his own pleasure and taste, which is ultimately the only criterion that holds. His series of paintings of vinyl sleeves from the 70s and 80s from the African continent tell all that makes them precious in the artist's eyes: the music contained in the record, of course, but also the image that appears on it - an aesthetic witness to an era -, the typography used or even the wear and tear of the cardboard sleeve, which also tells something of the history of the object. Vincent Michéa masterfully manages to introduce into his works the very matter of the feeling that links him to the things he represents (objects, images, places), and this on the same register as their way of existing in our inner space - without great feelings, without magnifying the line, simply by association of ideas and emotions.
From photomontage to painting via photography, everything is linked in Michéa's work and everything is in dialogue, multiplying the links that draw a flagrantly modern universe, inscribed in a vast iconography, African but also European and American. Through the construction of his images, at the border of different places and times, impalpable temporality, spatiality, Michéa embarks us into another space-time. In his latest series of works, the artist has brilliant fun blurring the boundaries between his different practices, offering us very large paintings of the city of Dakar through its sky and its architecture in particular, paintings that sometimes take on the guise of collages and thus misleadingly deceive the viewer's eye while revealing the richness of the dialogue that can exist between photomontage and painting.
From the extravagant derision of the Dada artists Raoul Hausman, John Hartfield and Hanna Höche, Vincent Michéa keeps and extends, in a joyfully irreverent spirit, a posture of rejection of aesthetic conventions. Thus, cultures mix, materials also, the low and the high are reversed, evoking in a more contemporary way the works of Romare Bearden, Mickalene Thomas or Lorna Simpson for example. The graphic construction of the images is in line with the work of Roman Cieslewicz and often remains subversive in its relationship to the code of representation. These aesthetic exchanges give rise to a visual poetry that is characteristic of his forms and which translates Michéa's committed vision of the world.
Vincent Michéa's skilful irony is indeed not at all futile. Something important is at stake here. In the composition, the colours, the shapes. Everything is there and nothing needs to be added. The difficulty of keeping it simple, of getting to the point and sticking to it. The importance of the choice of words for the titles of his works illustrates his relationship with the image. Vincent Michéa touches the subtle force of certain familiar adages, 'Que reste-t-il de nos amours', 'Toi seulement', 'Le ciel sera toujours bleu'... The artist thus reveals, through his eye and his works, all the fragments of poetry that make up our daily lives and succeeds in paying them tribute.
Prodigy of the image and its polysemy, Vincent Michéa works in a body to body of materials, always in a great fidelity to its iconographic source, with an intimate and memorial report with the plastic and symbolic objects which surround it. The works of the artist acquire the vibrancy of authenticity, without pomp or mannerism, and carry us with accuracy to the meeting of his sensitive interpretation of the world.