In situ / Toi seulement, Vincent Michéa : Dakar, Sénégal

Vincent Michéa is first and foremost a collector of images. His own shots as well as clichés drawn from African history inhabit his creative process. His approach is a committed one, his choice of photographs is sentient. Vincent Michéa only works with images that move him, animate him and make sense in his work. Everything is connected. Pieces tie into one another, they are superimposed, answer each other, or multiply. Michéa’s paintings are as many hyphens to a  flagrant history of modernity. In this obsessive quest, Michéa turns himself into a fabulous image manipulator and one of the  first painters to cover a vibrant and uplifting African iconography.

Michéa seriously plays with the views, the references, and talk to us using the language of color about his standards, cinema, popular music, a beautiful time, here but mostly from elsewhere: another space-time, a nostalgia, a futuristic vision, humanistic.

Dedicated to his practice of photomontage, Toi seulement is a visual wander through the plastic research that has marked the artist’s career over the last decade. Known for his pop and colourful paintings that borrow their themes from a popular film and music culture as well as from the daily life of West African cities, Vincent Michéa has also developed a serial approach that is more confidential but just as ambitious which this exhibition intends to make people discover and rediscover. The chronological display takes us from Paris to Dakar via Abidjan, three cities that occupy an important place in the artist’s life, three geographies but also three cultural influences that respond and echo each other from work to work.