Chimères: Online Viewing Room

These two collages by Vincent Michéa were made in collaboration with Sadikou Oukpedjo during their duo show Les Fantômes de l'Afrique (Siriel Rellik) at the Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Dakar from May to June 2018. They have also been displayed during the 2018 Dakar Biennale.  

Between Sadikou Oukpedjo's monumental sculptures, half human and half animal, the aerial metal structures designed by Vincent Michéa and the photo-collages that divert their image on paper, this collaborative work unfolds as a repertoire of precise gestures, sometimes harmonious and sometimes dissident, using the material as a field for experimentation.

Vincent Michéa's photo-montage brings a meticulous gesture, with dexterity he unearths and manipulates Sadikou Oukpedjo's sculptures printed on glossy paper to make them exist in a world where history is constantly being rewritten.

Both sculptor and performer, Jems Koko Bi mixes avant-garde influences with his resolutely African history. In his work, he questions notions of space and history in a continuous reflection on his own existence. He is thus interested in migration, difference and the mechanisms of domination that exist in our society, in resonance with a common past.

In multiple swings, muffled by the shards and noise, a face emerges from the stump. It is extracted by the mechanised, understanding hand. It was always there, it was simply hidden from the world. The gesture reveals the being. In rhythm, with softness, the artist seems to caress by touches the surface that he transforms at each passage. He awakens the element with intuitive and controlled precision. A dance armed with an iron fist in a breath of tenderness.

The characters in Serigne Ibrahima Dieye's paintings and installations are ideas to which the artist has given body and substance. They are visual allegories of evils that are tearing contemporary societies apart, but not only: once on canvas, on paper, or embodied in wood, these ideas take on their autonomy and become the protagonists of a dramatic narrative whose interpretation is the responsibility of the spectators.

Through a strong plastic gesture, the artist intends to denounce the systemic violence of our contemporary world while trying to create the conditions for everyone to also reflect on his or her share of responsibility and the role that one can choose to take - or not - in this world.

The formal, by its symbolic scope and its action, leads us to rethink the place of the dream here and now, in its repetition, as in its crossing of different geographical points. Yo-Yo Gonthier is a composer, of lines, of meaning, of sounds, the materiality of his work results from this. From an engraved object, an imprint on paper appears, it is photographed, pinned. Reproducibility attests to a return to the essence of a form.

"It is the emergence of the marvellous that we are dealing with here, nimbled in its course by a visceral, existential, metaphysical anguish. It is the notion of commitment that we are talking about here, from the vertiginous momentum of the first step, to the collective, building and fundamental gesture. It is the freedom of imagination that we are talking about here. It's about your eyes full of daring and love. It is your word and mine that we are talking about here, may they remain here, mixed together forever." Yo-Yo Gonthier on his work Une éclaircie, 2013

A Beninese artist living today between Cotonou, Brussels and Paris, Dimitri Fagbohoun's work is inseparable from his own experience and his plural identity.

Evolving towards the reconquest and re-appropriation of remarkable figures of West African statuary in exile, he has been developing the Re-Collection project since 2017, in which masterpieces of so-called classical African art are reproduced and staged by different craftsmen and by the artist himself. By hybridizing, these forms become part of a new space of representation that integrates the importance of reappropriating one's heritage while being part of creation and novelty.

Dimitri Fagbohoun expresses a relationship to history in which his writing disturbs the models that constitute it.