Le goût de la mangue
[The taste of mango]
In one of her best-known and most fascinating essays, All About Love (1), the American writer bell hooks explains that love is a verb of action. In her search for a definition of love, she takes up that of the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who defines it as "the will to extend oneself in order to nourish one's own spiritual growth or that of others". So love is not just a feeling, it's a choice and a voluntary act. It materialises in the creation of a caring, respectful and honest environment. More than just aesthetic harmony, the characters painted by Rachel Marsil seem to commune with depth, whether they are couples, friends or sisters dressed as twins. And the fruit of love here takes the form of a mango, which we're not sure is the forbidden fruit, so reluctant are the women who seize it to taste its flavour, preferring to keep it as a precious object.
For her first solo show in Abidjan, Rachel Marsil plunges the gallery into a world of lush vegetation, where fruit grows in abundance and the sea seems very close. The artist is also experimenting with paintings of bathers, in the style of Paul Gauguin or Emile Bernard. The peaceful faces, at first sight identical, cast a questioning glance at the viewer who lingers there, sending us back to our own emotions. But if these faces seem to reflect great serenity, they are in fact marked in places by solitude, doubt or melancholy. We would be hard pressed to date them, as there are so few clues to their period. Some of the paintings adopt an aesthetic reminiscent of the West African studio photographs of the 1960s, from which the artist draws inspiration in both poses and outfits. But Rachel Marsil also moved away from portraiture and scenes of intimacy, with works that tended towards an initial form of abstraction, in particular the depiction of mangoes on geometric backgrounds made up of arabesques and curves. These works may evoke the motifs of batik fabrics, a craft found in Grand-Bassam, and recall the artist's initial training in textile design.
In artistic residence in Grand-Bassam since March, Rachel Marsil crosses the long mango-lined alleys every day, probably following in the footsteps of the women who came from Abidjan to demand the release of the political leaders detained by the colonial authorities in 1949. So it's no coincidence that the women she paints stand tall, defiant and proud. She is also continuing her sculpture work, which began in autumn 2023 at the Ouagadougou Sculpture Biennial, in the workshop of a bronze-maker in the town of Grand-Bassam. She will be presenting a new series of sculptures in bronze and wood, representing fruit trees in delicate balance. These fruit trees appear as allegories of the long and sometimes delicate growth of love as described by bell hooks.
Aby Gaye
(1) bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, Harper Collins, 2000
