The exhibition Ce que la main retient (What the hand holds) brings together a conversation between the works of artists Cheikh Ndiaye, François-Xavier Gbré, and Roméo Mivekannin, in the Parisian space of Galerie Cécile Fakhoury.
In this exhibition, the respective mediums of the three artists (oil painting, pigment print, and elixir on raw canvas), become complementary, as their research involves a constant back-and-forth between past and present.
With a method and meticulousness that borders on obsession, each artist seeks in their own way to explore archives and architecture, disciplines that share a drive to make tangible a state of constant temporal and conceptual evolution. These two disciplines, which run through the work of those artists, connect possibility to reality, chaos to order, presence to absence. They nourish their investigations, which converge in a common gesture: that of preserving a trace, across interconnected geographies such as Senegal, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Morocco.
The exhibition gradually operates from abstraction to precision, like a focus coming into clarity. From the social abstraction and timeless works of Roméo Mivekannin, we move toward the documentary precision of François-Xavier Gbré’s photography, and then to Cheikh Ndiaye’s paintings, before returning once more from form to erasure, in a cyclical struggle between memory and forgetting.
Roméo Mivekannin (1986, Bouaké, Ivory Coast) pursues an attempt to materialize the invisible: the mechanisms of social order, power structures, and systems of exclusion, making abstraction a truly critical language. His work is illustrated by his painting on raw canvas. Like an initiatory rite, the artist immerses the fabrics that will form the background of his works, in ritual solutions, baths of elixir, that challenge the links between history and the contemporary world.
François-Xavier Gbré (1978, Lille, France) With a sensitivity committed to observing the state of the world, François-Xavier Gbré's photographs reveal a passage, a trace. The unexpected object, the detail that refers to history is always present. In the chaos of urban spaces, he raises questions about social dynamics, historical narratives, and local realities that resonate universally.
Cheikh Ndiaye (1970, Dakar, Senegal) An established figure on the African and international scene, based between Prague, Dakar, and Paris. His paintings and installations tell the social and cultural history of West African cities, offering a visual interpretation of anthropology and architecture. Here, Cheikh Ndiaye presents oil paintings, whose drying time depends on the humidity of the surrounding environment. Through his medium, he weaves the link between the time of the artwork and the space in which it is created.
