Cécile Fakhoury Gallery- Paris is pleased to announce the opening of the solo exhibition, La marche du varan, by the artist François-Xavier Gbré on October 19, 2022. This new exhibition gathers a series of unpublished photographs and will be visible until November 26, 2022.
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François-Xavier Gbré kept walking, step by step, on the traces left by his land of Eburnia in composition, in decomposition, in recomposition. Traces of yesterday, traces of today, divinatory traces of a future not always peaceful. He walks, well camped on his two eyes, the question mark on the retina and the sensitive surface which extends it. It is on foot that Côte d’Ivoire was "conquered", it is on foot that he makes us rediscover it.
François-Xavier Gbré kept walking, the one who blends within himself the essence of two countries intertwined by a history sedimented in scattered layers on the territory, on the city, on the humans who live there. To the blurred memories, to the thwarted tomorrows, he proposes fragments to stitch a Nzassa memory, a patchwork memory. To the sempiternal oblivion, he opposes the raw look often, cruel sometimes, on stigmas that we want to relegate in the dungeons of a modernity which is made in the tortuous step of the varan. François-Xavier Gbré reveals his own footprints, the long sinuous trail of a development filled with hope, vanity and disillusionment, to a whole country that advances by erasing its traces with its tail.
A coast is approached by sea. And this one, with its hat of threatening clouds, carries in its bosom what the sailors of La Rochelle already named the "puy du diable". The photographer from Poitiers cannot ignore it when he points out the sea of Grand-Bassam. To slip into the gaze of a part of his ancestors before turning to the other party's consideration... The tone is set at the opening of this new exhibition, Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, avenue Matignon.
"Tell me how you live, I'll tell you who lives within you", such seems to be the lively visual negotiation to which the "walker of the layered Côte d’Ivoire" invites. There is the Côte d’Ivoire of the age of colonization frozen in decrepitude invaded by roots on a wall of what remains of the Hotel de France, in Grand-Bassam, the first capital; there is the Côte d’Ivoire of the age of independence in tatters spread on the wall of the PDCI in Yamoussoukro, the last capital; there is the Côte d’Ivoire of the age of triumphant cocoa with its architecture from elsewhere (France, Italy, Israel ...), its pyramids that walk on the head, its broken lines, its forced asymmetries, its concrete priapisms... There is the Côte d’Ivoire of Manhattan Ebrié, overplayed and overloaded showcase for presbyopes and which can only be seen from afar because unable to withstand the close examination to which the photographer submits it; there is the Côte d’Ivoire of today, a permanent construction site of great works intertwined between the mineral of humans and nature.
Thus, in his slow movement through space, François-Xavier Gbré also walks through time. A time where, as in the circle of the ancient assembly, he summons "those from before", fathers and peers of the past. The Photivoire studio and those who can now be called “la bande à Normand” (Louis Normand, Jean Carval, Paul Kodjo, Schneider, etc.), they too have walked, they too have stopped to show the country's transformation. François-Xavier Gbré's work responds to theirs in a game of echoes that reminds us that history, without necessarily being a perpetual restart, is caught up in confusing hiccups. The gesture is collective, the eye of yesterday is soaked in the same bath of photons as today.
François-Xavier Gbré kept walking, without waiting for an answer from all the poncifics, from all the pythias of a development plywood on all the facades. For as Guillaume Koffi, an architect, says so pertinently about Abidjan: "this city develops faster than it is thought".
Text : Gauz'
