In “Nouvelle aurore” (“New Dawn”), a poem from Hommes de tous les continents written to celebrate the dawn of independence and creative freedom, Bernard Binlin Dadié proclaims “the time of the child’s dream.” He calls for a revitalization of ancient forms of expression and popular imaginaries within the New City envisioned by past generations—a way of invoking an alternative modernity. A modernity freed from the ambiguities surrounding the Romantic rediscovery of African arts by the European avant-garde movements of twentieth-century painting and sculpture.
Since the seminal exhibition Corps sculptés, corps parés, corps masqués (1989), which explored at the Grand Palais the relationship between ancestry and tutelary spirits in the arts of Côte d’Ivoire, the connection between aesthetics and spirituality has remained largely underestimated in projections of this artistic scene. Yet contemporary creation is deeply marked by the persistence of the invisible and of sacred geometries, from Christian Lattier and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré to Ouattara Watts and Ernest Dükü. For the latter, the first two stand as totemic figures, artistic references without whom a full understanding of his formal vocabulary would be difficult. In literature, Dadié, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Jean-Marie Adiaffi play a similar role as foundational pillars of a synthetic body of work.
Both painter and architect, Ernest Dükü shifts the inquiry into matter and volume that preoccupied the artists of the Vohou-Vohou movement—dominant at the Fine Arts School of Abidjan during his formative years—toward metaphysical territories where substance always transcends form. Influenced by the revivalist intuitions of the Afro-Caribbean movement active along the shores of the Ébrié Lagoon, by the Fwomajé collective, by AfriCOBRA, and by major trans-African artists such as Wifredo Lam and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dükü conceives an aesthetics of relation of remarkable plasticity. It draws its origins from Pharaonic Egypt and Nubia, revisited by Cheikh Anta Diop in Civilisation ou barbarie(1981), but above all in his seminal work The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality.
The Time of the Child’s Dream — Invisible Architectures invites Ernest Dükü to open the doors of our inner city in dialogue with two major artists of trans-African modernities represented by Galerie Cécile Fakhoury: Wèrèwèrè Likingand Souleymane Keïta.
A poet whose practice emerged from performance, ritual theatre, and the performing arts, Wèrèwèrè Liking considers herself a kind of vibrational continuation of her ancestors. She has developed a singular body of work that unfolds a mysterious grammar sustained by a sensibility attuned to all cosmic orders. Her selection will be limited to four paintings from the Fantastic Cities series.
Souleymane Keïta belongs to the first generation of the Dakar School, whose emergence was encouraged by Léopold Sédar Senghor in order to give visual form to the philosophical principles of Négritude. His economy of light and repetition of signs characterize a painting that joyfully reconnects with the hermetic traditions of Sudano-Sahelian initiatory societies. Keïta’s presentation will focus on four works from the Synthèse, Scarifications, and Chemise du chasseur series.
In the gallery’s Project Space, Invisible Architectures — Dreams in Mirror will bring together seven trans-African artists around Ernest Dükü: Assoukrou Aké; Dalila Dalléas Bouzar; François-Xavier Gbrè; Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien; Roméo Mivekannin; Cheikh Ndiaye; and Ouattara Watts.
Through their visual unity, the two exhibition spaces embody the idea of rebirth—the absolute continuity between night and the birth of day beneath the star-filled vault of the sky. This celestial canopy evokes Nut, the goddess who personifies the course of light, the bottomless darkness across which the stars—her children—travel. She governs the principle of life and death and embodies the promise of resurrection. She witnesses the voyage of Ra and his companions in a solar barque through the twelve gates of the underworld described in the Book of Gates, symbolizing the counting of the hours within the day-night-day cycle.
The exhibition design seeks to reaffirm the scenographic gesture as a practice that is at once curatorial and artistic.
