Galerie Cécile Fakhoury - Paris is pleased to present Sadikou Oukpedjo's new solo exhibition, Mémoires contemporaines d’un continent (Contemporary Memories of a Continent), at 29 avenue Matignon, 75008, from Thursday 12 May to Saturday 18 June 2022.
At the crossroads of a contemporary vision and an ancestral gesture, Sadikou Oukpedjo's works seem to be inhabited by a magical power. The artist offers a series of paintings on canvas and paper, some using a novel technique of mixing pigments and encaustics. Sometimes close to a chemical experiment or a ritual concoction, the artist's sculptural works display subtle colours, more or less deep or ethereal, which, like the apparent paradox suggested by the title, are inscribed beyond earthly contingencies, at the crossroads of the past and the contemporary.
Some works seem to have been revealed to us from time immemorial, as if excavated from a place preserved by the passage of time. The gentle colossi that inhabit Sadikou Oukpedjo's paintings are sometimes shown in introspective postures, withdrawn from the hustle and bustle of the world, sometimes in scenes of struggle or confrontation. Sadikou Oukpedjo's works take us to a temporal and material otherworldliness, their quasi-mineral support taking us into the realm of sculpture and into an imaginary world of thousand-year-old cave paintings.
Other works, on the other hand, display bold colours and include symbols that leave no doubt about the modern age, which Sadikou critically observes here: an African continent under the sway of foreign interests, dispossessed of its wealth and power, as if blind to this domination, powerless. And beyond that, an uncompromising critique of human baseness, of the repetition of the same old thing and of those who play on the distress of others as they please.
As an enlightened witness of his time, Sadikou Oukpedjo uses irony to deplore what he identifies as the primary evil affecting the African continent today: voluntary servitude to various powers, whether religious, economic or political. A man who believes he is fishing finds himself to be the fish at the end of the line, while another abandons himself without reluctance to the arms of an illusory morpheus, and the apple, a poor fruit plagued by all our ills, turns out to be nothing but a chimera.
The artist is an alchemist, who manages to obtain mysterious and magical transformations, thus upsetting the established order not only of materials but also of our beliefs and idols. Taking care not to make moralising truth another fetish, Sadikou Oukpedjo dodges pre-established categories and instead offers us a powerful confrontation with forms and colour as a way of experiencing this inner displacement, this reconfiguration of our intimate architecture that is specific to art.
His therianthropic, half-human, half-animal figures are part of a long series of myths and beliefs, ranging from Egyptian deities to shamanic rites. In a manner reminiscent of Greek or African mythologies, Sadikou Oukpedjo's works present heroes and their epics, sometimes fantastic creatures, intermediaries between gods and men, as a pictorial system to explain our societies and the origin of our cities.
The aesthetic subtlety of the paintings of Sadikou Oukpedjo, a prophet artist, nevertheless suggests the finesse of the ideas they evoke. The acerbic criticism is never devoid of tenderness, and the accuracy of the artist's gaze is made up of as much sadness as hope. If the struggle of men with each other and within themselves is often not pretty, the gods have sometimes thwarted their fate. The word of the oracle always has several meanings, which are expressed here in the beauty of the antagonisms, open or intimate, recounted by Sadikou Oukpedjo through his works.
