In Situ / L'Esprit du large, chapitres I et II : Group show

L'Esprit du large (The Spirit of the open sea) is an invitation to see far away, to widen our horizons and knowledge, and to trade at the crossroads. In the exhibition, the artworks commingle without imposing any order; they converse at the discretion of the artists' imaginations. From one to the other, they suggest new itineraries.

L'Esprit is here a living force that pulls us towards an elsewhere as much as it brings this elsewhere to us to open other horizons - spiritual (Ouattara Watts, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Jems Koko Bi), imaginary and utopian/dystopian (Yo-Yo Gonthier, Sadikou Oukpedjo), historical and cultural (Vincent Michéa, François-Xavier Gbré and Dimitri Fagbohoun).

After Chapter I, the group exhibition travelled from Dakar to Abidjan, in order to enhance the aesthetic resonance of the works through a conversation between two exhibition spaces, two publics, two cities. For this second chapter, the artists' installations change scale and respond to their new in situcontext. Playing on the inside/outside of the gallery, the height of the picture rails and the scale of the volumes, the works weave poetic links between them according to the artists' imaginations and approach each other without imposed order to invite us to think about new itineraries.

With his piece Travel through the night, Ouattara Watts plunges us into his fascination with the color black. Black as night, black as half of the canvas, a black from which emerges a series of symbols and signs. Door of the Cosmos #1 and #2, Farafina #2, and Untitled are visual and spiritual journeys.

Numbers, shapes, but also textures and fabrics make up Ouattara Watts' plastic language. Each of the artist's paintings is a dynamic microcosm, a negative partition of the cultures that make up his universe: jazz music, African traditions and rituals, abbjad and Hebrew guematria numeration to name but a few of his influences. Ouattara Watts explores in his painting the intangible links that transcend geography and nationalities.

Burey Bambata (The Great Clouds) by Yo-Yo Gonthier is a collective ode to dream about. In this video, a visual epic shot with a Super 8 camera, Yo-Yo Gonthier brings together the whimsical dreams of an artist as a brilliant inventor and the semantic richness rooted in the history of vernacular customs that touch both the artist's personal history and that of a part of Africa. He takes as his video protagonist the Cloud, this sculpture of fabric of several meters realized in 2013 and reactivated several times during performances whose preparation can be found in the photographs of notebooks and models. 

With his cloud machines, Yo-Yo Gonthier attempts to take us elsewhere, to figuratively take off. In his approach to his work, the border between elements is often fluid: the marine animal becomes the inspiration for a flying machine. His photographs are notebooks, and then models that suggest the idea of an artist-inventor whose vital function is to imagine other worlds. 

Both a photographer and a plastic artist, Yo-Yo Gonthier questions the erasure of memory in a western society where progress and technology seem to be essential values.

The headless sculpture by Jems Koko Bi lying on the board seems engrossed in the reading of a work. Get rid of the head that thinks, of the mind that rationalises and judges. 

Continuing a constitutive reflection of Jems Koko Bi's work on notions of space and history, Retour is the vision of a positive exodus, free of the tragic stereotypes often associated with contemporary migration. The work is a procession to the house; to the walls built with our desires, hopes, and hands. 

Both sculptor and performer, Jems Koko Bi blends avant-garde influences with his resolutely African history. As a man who is a link between tradition and contemporary, Africa and Europe, Côte d'Ivoire and Germany, Jems Koko Bi practices an art of crossing and building bridges where worlds separate.

Sadikou Oukpedjo draws from the myths of various cultures to give body and substance to his anthropomorphic figures - here the painting is textured. The canvases Nouvelle mythologie #11 and Untitled are filled with the invisible and its power, with the unknown and the hidden. In En réponse à Courbet, a massive silhouette seems to move away towards a misty horizon. From the master to free himself, to accept the dark side of the Origin of the World.

Sadikou Oukpedjo is part of a process that questions our deepest origins, thus responding to the human need to access self-knowledge through multiple and ancestral attempts: cosmogony, rites, witchcraft. The artist then becomes a magician, a master, an illusionist, a scholar.