Sadikou Oukpedjo’s works seem to be inhabited by a magical power. They sometimes seem to have been revealed to us from an immemorial time, as if excavated from a place preserved by the passage of time. The gentle colossi in Sadikou Oukpedjo’s work are sometimes shown in introspective postures, withdrawn from the hustle and bustle of the world, sometimes in scenes of struggle or confrontation. Sadikou Oukpedjo’s works take us into a temporal and material elsewhere, their quasi-mineral support taking us into the field of sculpture and giving us access to an imaginary world of thousand-year-old cave paintings.
His therianthropic figures, half-human and half-animal, are part of a long series of myths and beliefs, ranging from Egyptian deities to shamanic rites. In a manner reminiscent of Greek or African mythologies, Sadikou Oukpedjo’s works present heroes and their epics, sometimes fantastic creatures, intermediaries between gods and men, as a pictorial system to explain our societies and the origin of our cities.
His representations are charged with or crossed by the invisible and its power, by the unknown and the hidden. Man analyses the world, models nature, seeks to know the secrets he can use. He is a magician, a master, an illusionist, a scientist, when the essence of life inevitably metamorphoses and transcends the world of ideas.
The pastels on paper, the monumental outdoor sculptures, the large canvases, the engravings, the ceramics and the carved stones reflect an inner state, in the tortuous silence of the inner self. This morphological, anatomical study has to do with the spiritual. The creature that Sadikou Oukpedjo brings to life in his works constitutes an archive of human consciousness crossed by the question of its primary origin, to tend towards an uncertain future.
The aesthetic subtlety of Sadikou Oukpedjo’s paintings, a prophet artist, nevertheless suggests the sharpness of the ideas that they evoke. The acerbic criticism is never devoid of tenderness, and the accuracy of the artist’s gaze is made up of as much sadness as hope. If the struggle of men with each other and within themselves is often not pretty, the gods have sometimes thwarted their fate. The word of the oracle always has several meanings, which are expressed here in the beauty of the antagonisms, open or intimate, told by Sadikou Oukpedjo through his works.