The exhibition Ce que la main retient brings together, in the Paris space of Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, a conversation between the works of artists Cheikh Ndiaye, François-Xavier Gbré, and Roméo Mivekannin.
In the exhibition, the respective mediums of these three artists—oil painting, pigment print, elixir on unstretched canvas—become complementary, as their research is marked by a constant back-and-forth between past and present.
With a method and meticulousness that sometimes borders on obsession, each artist seeks, in their own way, the archive and architecture as shared elements—both driven by a movement to render tangible a state in perpetual temporal and conceptual evolution. These two disciplines, which run through their practices, bind possibility to reality, chaos to order, presence to absence. They nourish their investigations, which converge in a common gesture: the desire to preserve a trace, across interconnected geographies such as Senegal, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Morocco.
The exhibition layout thus operates a gradual shift from abstraction to precision, like a focusing lens. From the socially abstract, timeless works of Roméo Mivekannin, we move toward the documentary precision of François-Xavier Gbré’s imagery, and then to Cheikh Ndiaye’s painting—only to return once more from form to erasure in a cyclical struggle between memory and forgetting.
