« Bonne nouvelle » is the first solo exhibition of the painter Thibaut Bouedjoro- Camus in Ivory Coast. Born in France (Reims) to French and Ivorian parents, Thibaut Bouedjoro-Camus brings together in his painting intimate and collective questions that take as their backdrop meticulously constructed spaces, anchored in the strata of a space-time where Abidjan and Paris are mixed.
Tools for understanding and investigating oneself in the turmoil of a broader history, the works of Thibaut Bouedjoro-Camus comment on the past of the Ivory Coast through the prism of his dual culture. However, by blurring the lines, the artist refuses the viewer the comfort of a simplified reading of history, preferring to create associations of images and subjects that lead us to approach it in all its complexity, up to its contemporary ramifications.
People, events, objects become then pivots of history, as the very symbolic Djidji Ayowke whose trajectory is the subject of a painting where several spaces and temporalities stir together. By multiplying the angles, Thibaut Bouedjoro-Camus creates an echo between figures from different times and spaces. Thus, Louis- Gustave Binger and Vincent Bolloré seem to support each other in La marche des femmes de Grand-Bassam. William Wade Harris preaches the good news to a couple who came from the generation party (Bonjour, Prophète Harris), and yesterday’s struggle meet contemporary and future resistances, through the portraits of Marie Koré and Rachel Kéké. The games of transpositions and correspondences also apply to the materials and the canvas meticulously prepared by the former student of the Beaux-Arts de Paris sometimes makes way to strips of Korhogo’s canvas.
Not devoid of humor, the artist flirts with the absurd and the satire in an uninhibited approach that does not refrain from any reference, nor any ambiguity. He quotes Caravaggio (La collection de Paul de Tarse), transposes Courbet (Bonjour, Prophète Harris), while relying on a popular culture issued from the cinema, in a set of small formats, such as these small paintings inspired by Les Bronzés, a film revealing the relationship between France and Ivory Coast relation and more broadly of the relationship of France and its former colonies.
The unconscious is one of the detouring ways that the artist takes in order to formulate his research, and certain images seem to be nourished by dreams whose strangeness the artist assumes, sensitive and direct, in moments where he delivers to the viewer a form of rebus. In Le songe de Catherine, a woman dozing in the foreground seems to dream a round where a friend of the artist and his companion appear, and where a weaver on a pirogue sails far away.
An unconscious space that allows darker visions to emerge, in the work Les mains de l’Etat, where we feel a threat, whether state or religious, or in Massage, where the artist transcends a comic scene that shifts to a disturbing figure, in a renewed reading of images and post-colonial history.
