In Situ / Yopougon, Adjamé, Liberté - Armand Boua: Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

From June 1 to September 14, 2019, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury was pleased to present Yopougon, Adjamé, Liberté, the second solo exhibition of Ivorian artist Armand Boua. In it, Armand Boua evokes the districts of Abidjan that are at the origin of his works, these scenes of life that are both fleeting and persistent, singular and emblematic of a city, a country, and more broadly of a collective history. Following Brobrosseurs, a solo exhibition that took place in Dakar in 2018, the new series of works on cardboard and canvas is presented as a fragmented portrait of the history of a youth struggling with a confused, impatient and fascinating modernity.

Born in 1978 in Abidjan, Armand Boua draws his pictorial subjects from his daily life and fills his painting with the human encounters he experiences. Having grown up and still living today in Yopougon, a popular commune of the capital, he is marked by the life of the streets and the laborious existence of a fringe of the population that tries to survive there and of which he makes his favourite theme. Armand Boua paints mainly on cardboard plates, a raw material that he collects in the very streets that inspire him.

While Armand Boua is painting with a meticulous technique which could remind us of classical painting (geometrical composure of pictural scenes, play on the light through the juxtaposition of colour), the artist is taking distance from the constraints of figuration. He literally deconstructs his images, scratching them and brushing them; to finally offer to the viewer the contemplation of an almost abstract scenery wherein a palpable vitality reigns, as if it were tirelessly nurtured by the agitated streets and its inhabitants who inspire him.

The portraits, may they be individual or collective, seem familiar to us. They reveal themselves as an intimate memory and we have a sensitive appreciation of them, as if they had travelled through time to settle in our imagination after the fashion of mental sketches. 

Captured unposed, those faces and postures with a bowl, a color, a wheelbarrow, or an attitude operating as attributes, appear as emblems recognizable at first glance. The group overrides the individual. Those singular personalities only make sense to the viewer as immutable allegories of an incarnated culture. Armand Boua represents them this way, while challenging the supposed steadiness of the image. By deconstructing those street scenes, the artist brings to the fore the singular behind the symbols.