The Galerie Cécile Fakhoury , in partnership with the Embassy of France in Senegal, is pleased to present the solo exhibition of the artist Vincent Michéa, Dakar Punto Final at the Residence of the Embassy of France in Senegal from February 6 to 28, 2023.
Dakar Punto Final, an expression that would revive the salsa steps of even the deepest dancers of yesteryear, an expression that a whole generation of music lovers in Dakar will recognize. The title is borrowed from the discography of the Dominican musician Johnny Pacheco, an emblematic figure of salsa in the 1970s who helped popularize the genre in West Africa with Afro-Cuban rhythms and lively horns.
Dakar Punto Final is also Vincent Michéa's third major exhibition in Senegal since his first in 2008 at the Galerie Le Manège of the French Institute in Dakar. Fifteen years have passed between the two exhibitions, and like a cycle we are back to where we started. In the meantime, everything has changed, nothing has changed. Everything about Dakar is there in Vincent Michéa's work, its architecture, its music and its people.
Everything has changed in Dakar, starting with its urbanism, the favorite subject of Vincent Michéa's recent works, a joyful nostalgic of a city in great upheaval. The emblematic buildings of post-independence modernism, the Maginot Building, the Hôtel Indépendance, or the buildings of Rue Robert Brun are cut out and recomposed, detached from their environment and reinstalled in the artist's graphic universe. The combinations of color, the geometric shapes that make up the backgrounds are arranged in an evocative whole, sometimes of the frenzy of the city, sometimes of the clever balance of forces between formal and informal. Once emblems of modernity, they are now synonymous with a bygone era.
Everything has changed, the music scene of yesteryear and its pulsating nightlife, carried by the Pacheco, the Etoile de Dakar of the young Youssou Ndour, or Orchestra Baobab. Vincent Michéa, as guardian of a popular and festive memory, immortalizes the vinyl covers in a series of over a hundred paintings, including the red Xalis (2014).
And nothing has changed, the people themselves remain a source of inspiration for the painter, such as Pape, the artist's long-time carpenter proudly wearing the colors of 100% Dakar1; or these "girlfriends", a duo of laughing young women that the artist stages many times, reinventing through his flat tints of bright colors the context of their meetings (The Great Return of the girlfriends - Orange Monet, 2021). The emblematic series of Fatou Pompidou also stages in a pop setting the wife of the artist at the crossroads of intimacy and art history and evokes at the same time the photographic studios of Seydou Keita or Mama Casset.
Nothing has changed, the blue sky that bathes the Cape Verde peninsula will always be blue2 for the artist. It is a motif to be explored, a witness to history and the tribulations of men. Vincent Michéa's kaleidoscopic vision brings together in a single canvas different angles of view and allows the viewer to live the time of a unique experience the incredible plurality of human perceptions, reminding us if necessary of the particular cohesion of the social fabric in Senegal.
Dakar Punto Final is thus an anthology of works embodying different moments of the rich career that Vincent Michéa has developed in permanent dialogue with his favorite muse: Dakar.
(1). 100% Dakar is a collective of graphic artists and designers founded by Bernard Beaudoin in 1985 and of which Vincent Michéa is a member since 1986.
(2). Le ciel sera toujours bleu is the title of Vincent Michéa's solo exhibition to be held at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery in Paris in spring 2023.
