Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to invite you to the opening of artist Dimitri Fagbohoun's solo exhibition, The Unexpected Consequences of History.
Pursuing a conceptual approach that has characterized his work for several years, Dimitri Fagbohoun invites us to look at the unexpected consequences of history. The exhibition is built on associations of forms and backgrounds. Dimitri Fagbohoun weaves a narrative and visual framework around archival photographs dating from the colonial period, on which he subtly intervenes, highlighting details and lines of force. The colored highlights seem to open up gaps in the image, a field of possibilities for an association of the senses and the imaginary. Thus adorned, the images come alive with a new dimension, the characters who inhabit them, men but also landscapes, involuntary protagonists of West African colonial history, are brought to light in their potential strength, their latent capacity for arrangement. The artist's intervention in the image, of the order of the infra-thin, reveals the place of a future; where the seed of a history of crossings and mixtures resides. The reading of the image, then, between historical facts and poetic reverie, branches out and gives rise to a network of resonances from the end of the 18th century to the present day.
Here, the plant metaphor is not insignificant. In Dimitri Fagbohoun's works, rivers, trees and the jungle are very particular presences. The earth appears as an original matrix, here again, the matrix of all possibilities. Thus The Amount, a sculpted grid evoking the irreducible profile of a geological section of the land of the ancestors before colonial predation; or The Gold Coast, a precious bronze chip cast in the earth, here extracted from its context to better return to it. And then, their faithful heralds, the Kota, Janus, Nkissi Pi statues and Dan masks - fabulous guardians of secret worlds that have fascinated the great artists of modernity; such as "the blue" Picasso, whose imprint can be seen in Kind of Blue #1 (2022) and White figure, (2017); but also more recently through the evocation of Man Ray or Brancusi.
Many decades after the end of the colonial project, Dimitri Fagbohoun chooses here to celebrate, in the purest form, the resilience of the African people, the ideal spurt of crossbreeding and the momentum of the diasporic movement. Between the works, the artist manages to establish a dialogue with several voices and to make sensitive the jubilant product of a surprising and creative hybridization.
