Encore un peu de bleu @ Musée Théodore Monod d'Art Africain, Dakar, Sénégal : Vincent Michéa
Pour cette nouvelle exposition personnelle intitulée Encore un peu de bleu, Vincent Michéa engage un dialogue vibrant avec les œuvres africaines traditionnelles du Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain. Fidèle à son goût pour les croisements de formes, de temporalités et de cultures, il explore ici la mémoire des objets et leur pouvoir d’évocation. Silhouettes, motifs et fragments s’y superposent dans un jeu d’ombres et de couleurs qui réinvente la rencontre entre héritage et modernité.
En découpant, juxtaposant et recomposant les figures issues du patrimoine africain, Michéa ne se contente pas d’en citer les formes : il en ravive la présence symbolique, dans une langue plastique qui lui est propre. Entre hommage et réinvention, ses collages déploient un espace poétique où se conjuguent histoire, regard et imaginaire – un lieu d’interférence féconde entre le musée, la mémoire et l’atelier.
Vincent Michéa: among the blue silhouettes of heritage
Vincent Michea has placed a few photos on a table in his studio. He bends down, picks up one of them, and hands it to me with a smile. I hesitate a little, so captivated am I by all these fragments scattered like archives, if indeed they are not. Archives of heritage, I think to myself, archives of life, quite simply. But I wonder if they might not be archives of our reckless imaginations.
These bits of heads, feet, and wooden busts, weathered and bathed in the dull light of museums, would not have been statues if they had not made the striking journey of man's excess, who wants to create God in his own image. Perhaps this is why, in our traditional societies, these small beings, cloaked in mystery, have always inspired fear, admiration, and respect. Revealed religions have cast opprobrium on what they consider to be fetishes, and ethnologists have ended up transforming them into contraband artifacts. Common parlance has made them objects of desire, and it is quite commonplace to hear them referred to as works of art. They are piled up in museum storerooms, reduced to ruins of greed, objects of covetousness, the accumulation of a society driven by the desire to possess.
Vincent Michea's paintings are composed of photographic prints of these African statues with their characteristic silhouettes, whose outlines are cut out and then pasted onto a blue background. This process creates a negation between two sides: empty and full. Presence and absence, far from contradicting each other, are revealed, because from this contrast, the shadows give off a light. I look at the photo handed to me and two thoughts come to mind. I consider that at this very moment, the museum is a camera obscura where the chemical soul of these objects, once organic, joyful, and free, is captured within a few square centimeters thanks to the magic that fixes their image on a sensitive surface. But this other idea unsettles me: before my eyes lies the weight of an entire history, that of the peoples of Africa.
When the artist completes his work and delivers it to the public, he is almost always filled with a feeling of casualness and dread. He is caught between a fleeting inspiration, like our passage on earth, and an eternal work as beautiful as life itself. As for the rest, the artist no longer feels concerned. Like a fleeting and resigned figure from our heritage, he returns to his reserve, whispering these words under his breath: alea jacta est. This expression applies to Vincent Michea's new blue series, which he presents for our appreciation. His invitation to the museum is part of an ambition to critically re-enchant the collections through cross-artistic readings.
El Hadji Malick Ndiaye,
Curator of the Théodore Monod Museum at IFAN
