Carl-Edouard Keïta was born in 1992 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He now lives and works in New York.
Glass Ceiling, Carl-Edouard Keïta's first solo exhibition in Paris, invites us into a shadowy theater of orange, blue and red colors and lines that seem to emerge with difficulty from a dizzying black background. Here in the intimacy of the darkness of the painting, the forgotten dreams and successes of Afro-descendants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century between France and the United States are recomposed.
The artist, engaged since his beginnings in a research on a black history of Western modernity, meets these forgotten destinies by coming across archives, some of which are now digitalized, circulating or rather emerging in the nebulous space of the Internet and its social networks. During this exhibition, Carl pays particular tribute to these identified sports figures such as Selika Lazevski, a distinguished horsewoman from the Belle Époque in Paris, or Battling Siki, born Amadou Fall, a Senegalese boxer who had a career in Europe and the United States. But also to all these anonymous black lives that we can sense when discovering the previous stories.
The aesthetics of Carl-Edouard Keita unfolds at the crossroads of influences, borrowing from the constructivist and cubist movements, as well as from African primitive arts or jazz. With the lead of the pencil, the artist strives to document our globalized society in perpetual evolution, through the sophistication of his drawing composed of geometric forms yet simple but which once assembled reveal a great mastery of lines, curves and the play of light.
Recent exhibitions : Picasso Remix (Le Manège, Dakar, 2022), 1-54 contemporary African art fair (Paris, 2021), Le Bal Noir (Galerie Cecile Fakhoury, Dakar, 2021), About Now (Galerie Cecile Fakhoury, Abidjan, 2020)
