Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to present Kôguôè (*the night, in baoulé), a solo exhibition of the young Ivorian artist Bamouin Sinzé.
Axel Angenor Bamouin Sinzé, of his artist name Bamouin Sinzé, was born in 1995 in Aboisso, in the South-Comoé region of Ivory Coast.
In 2014, he moved to Abidjan to begin his studies of visual arts at INSAAC, during which he refined his artistic and literary universe. Bamouin Sinzé has developed a plastic technique capable of immersing us in the intimacy of his nocturnal wanderings, facing the fragile balance between mirages and realities.
Since his childhood, Bamouin Sinzé has transported himself into an inner world, a world of chimeras in which he can gather himself. The plastic gesture allows him to give life to the figures that inhabit him, to give shape to the shadows. If this universe is not tangible, it is not necessarily non-existent. For Bamouin Sinzé, each of us has an intimate and specific knowledge of it, but only some of us have the curiosity or the temerity to assume it and embrace it.
With the support of certain teachers and thanks to models such as the Ivorian artists Ernest Dükü, Pascal Konan, Aboudia or Yéanzi, Bamouin Sinzé has been experimenting since 2016 a painting technique using smoke, a medium whose precariousness makes it, according to him, the most able to access the realm of dreams, the intangible, the hidden side of things.
Bamouin Sinzé, with a candle in his hand, draws lines, circles and curves in the air under his upside down canvas, most of the time at night, like invisible writing. The smoke transcribes these gestures on the canvas by grey and vaporous, fragile marks. The evanescence thus appears to be at the centre of his work. The artist seeks to represent a fragment of immortalized time, to seize the impalpable, to represent what inexorably ends up disappearing.
In the exhibition Kôguôè, which means «night» in Baoulé, Bamouin Sinzé invites us to follow him on his imaginary peregrinations, the fruit of chronic insomnia that has become a creative phenomenon over the years. The journey then begins, from dusk to dawn, to the encounter of human forms or spectral figures, in contact with a dark but familiar universe, beyond our denial of an uneasiness yet widely shared. The artist invites us to embrace our torments, to abandon for a while the artifices of a social ideal, to let ourselves be carried away by our darkness, without which day could not exist.
Creating a universe on the frontiers of the gothic, the spiritual, black magic and melancholy, Bamouin Sinzé thus proposes a work in the making and reveals a vulnerability transfigured into a sensitive force.
