Art X Lagos 2020: Online Viewing Room

Aboudia's work depicts the vitality and the unvarnished energy of a youth that gets by and manages; the smiles are a little nightmarish at times, but these broad smiles exalt their experience. This generation on the fringes of society is growing and taking on a new form. Its strength is becoming clearer as it is restructured. In each work swarms a multitude of lives, a breath of fresh air and noise, silhouettes seek their place in endlessly narrow spaces.

The living dead, zombies that are more awake than ever are illuminated in his tableaux. Between the concrete and the sand Aboudia creates a fantasy, a spontaneous festival, a thriller straight out of coastal West Africa.

With a sensibility that is deeply engaged in recording the state of the world and partaking in it through photography, François-Xavier Gbré's photographs reveal a passing, a track. The unexpected object or detail that brings back history is always present, moreover actual. In the urban confusion, where we sometimes get lost, and throughout his works, the question of our lifestyles, our social interactions and our relation to History, is raised on a local scale, as an echo of universal expression.

The past in Gbré's photographs is foreign and unfinished. United by a methodical, often distanced perspective on architecture and landscape as a form of documentary evidence, his work recalls the landmark photography of Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, and Guy Tillim.

Through vibrant colors, dynamic shapes, and hypnotic signs and symbols, Ouattara Watts explores the spiritual bonds that transcend geography and nationality. By merging found objects, photographs, and raw materials, Watts' paintings invoke the artist's multicultural identity and offer various levels of readings, socially and historically. With lyricism and wit, Watts conjures imaginary worlds and magical visions, both urban and ancestral, to contemplate the metaphysical relationships between beings.