In May 2013, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury presents “Surfaces”, an exhibition resulting from its first collaboration with the artist François-Xavier Gbré, in the showroom of the gallery.
The French and Ivorian artist’s proposal is made up of photographs that have the particularity of containing clues, stories, and traces of lives that have been forgotten, abandoned, or left in the shade. On the edge, between two states, and awakening projections from the past, these small frames are presented in structured groups. The installation unfolds as a trail full of a sensitivity induced by the color that deteriorated over time, an unexpected shape in a place that became obsolete or a surprising composition created naturally by the successive waves of passerby. A large print of the uninhabited apartment of the former director of the National Print of Porto Novo, Benin, arises from the plurality of the forms and the restructured fragments.
This process highlights a connection between constructing images that react with one another and these images’ singular stories. François-Xavier Gbré encourages reading and interpreting his photographs with a perspective shaped by exploration and more concerned with imagination than certainty.
