Focus sur / Masquerade #3, Aboudia: Partez à la rencontre du travail d'un artiste à travers l'analyse d'une de ses œuvres

This week, we invite you to discover Masquerade #3, a work by Aboudia, Ivorian artist born in 1983 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Suzanne Vogel, in charge of publishing at the Galerie Cécile Fakhoury - Abidjan, offers us a personal reading of this work.

Caught by two eyeballs, tricolored spirals, I open my eyes, by imitation. An eye for an eye. Aboudia's work, Masquerade #3, strikes my retina in its entirety, like a flash of light, a bolt of lightning, a blow. Slowly, my dazzled eyes recover from this shock and calm down.

I carefully detach myself from these round, wide-open eyes and head for more familiar landmarks. I move from one face to another. The one in the center of course, which seems to be devoured by its eyes, and those belonging to the collage at the back of the canvas, in the lower part. Traditional sculptures, faces in wood or bronze, in profile. A silhouette underlined by the artist, eyes still round, shaggy hair. The hair standing on end, the shiver of a shock.Release of energy or paralysis? Excitement or fear?

I can't decide. Aboudia's painting gives me ambivalent feelings, seemingly contrary. If these eyes wide open are those of terror, what do these bright colors mean? Yellow, orange, electric blue, a touch of green. A raspberry pink, a candy pink, a flesh pink. A blood pink, maybe. A latent discomfort remains in me, like a deposit, everlasting. The central figure also seems perplexed, torn between stupor and the vibration produced by the duplication of the artist's lines in oil pastel. The background is made of a collage of images, sheets, papers, gleaned by the artist from magazines, school notebooks, textbooks or in his studio. Above this background mesh are drawn acronyms, letters and arrows. I try to grasp the meaning of this composition, the story the images tell, the direction the arrows point. But maybe it's all just a fake treasure map, with no treasure to find. After all, the nightmares wouldn't be nightmares if they made sense. 

Aboudia seems to create as one would explode. His gestures are obsessive, his rhythm cathartic. Like a litany, the artist creates everywhere, all the time. No matter the medium. A few hours before the opening of his exhibition Masquerade, in Dakar, of which this painting was part, he paints a new series of works, on the ground, with these figures, increasingly alone on the canvas, linked together by the same hypnotized gaze and the same naked energy. The mouth, too, whether it has a frozen smile, whether it is obstructed or cries out in the void, seems silent. The eyes, devouring, take over the words.

How can the palpable violence of Aboudia's canvases be so intertwined with the feeling of a living force, a life force? His work is imbued with a childlike violence, not in the sense of an alleviated violence, but a violence all the more terrible as it can take no meaning at all. Childhood is here signalled by the pages of a school textbook or a holiday book, in the upper part of the background of the canvas. A colouring page, riddles, exercises. Education is a hope, it promises an elsewhere, a different future, a new generation. Then perhaps the images of traditional statues represent a heritage, a past. Sometimes heavy to carry. Then perhaps these encrypted acronyms are those of a universal puzzle, that of identity. As expressed by these double arrows, which try to create a link without indicating a way out. Where do we stand? How to make the density of an inheritance communicate with the space necessary for any creation of one's own?

Aboudia observes and paints. He observes the people around him, often young people, 'nouchis' as they say in Abidjan, to designate an urban culture and slang. A youth that moves forward, tchoko-tchaka, no matter what happens. But this vitality is not a sign of blindness. It is the sign of a strength, that of dealing with reality, of an attitude, often demonstrative and loquacious, of a humour, sometimes dark. The strength of those to whom nothing has been given, who have to grasp what they need and tell their own truth, made of nuances and contrasts. That of Aboudia, with his timid voice and relaxed attitude. A nonchalant solemnity.