The Ettore Fico Museum is programming the Afrika Now exhibition from Thursday 8 March to Sunday 30 June 2024 with five solo exhibitions by important artists of African and Guadeloupean origin already represented in Europe by major international galleries: Bouvy Enkobo, Victor Fotso Nyie, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, Salifou Lindou and James Mishio.

The five exhibitions aim to offer an overview and a focus on the new generations that are developing research, especially in the figurative, pictorial and sculptural fields. All the unpublished works are presented for the first time in a museum in Italy and most of them were created specifically for this

event.

Five monographic volumes will be edited for the occasion and enclosed in a single box set even if their existence will be autonomous and independent from the others. The invited artists have as the dominant theme and poetics in their works the human figure and in particular the portrait. Often they are self-portraits in which the artist plays different characters, becoming the actor and protagonist of the work, but also a paradigm of a reality that can be extended to the entire black community, whether it lives in Africa, or whether it lives in Europe or in other countries. The works are all large-format, as if to assert an even stronger presence, socially and politically, and propose real life according to the artist's personal poetics, intimately linked to the reality experienced in his daily life.

Political problems, family ties, social presences, affections and common stories are illustrated with a peculiar pictorial trait and an aesthetic autonomy that, although starting from internationally consolidated styles, are unmistakably linked to the Great Continent and to the black reality.

The pictorial and sculptural works are full of matter, even the most sublime such as gold, in patina, or silver, often evoked with tin foil and sheet metal. Energetic and material traits develop and overlap on the works to give even more strength to the trait and the sign to reiterate how the gesture and the presence of the artist are an integral part of the work, a sort of extension of thought through the posture of the body, the gestures of the arm and, finally, the strength of the hand that uses the brush and the spatula as a prosthesis of creative dynamism.

The five artists are different and diverse but appear as students or masters of the same expressive school. The African continent and the European continent overlap and mix until they become something else, as with the Hellenistic Greek sculpture that in Rome, in the centuries before and after Christ, finds new life and rewrites the history of art in its own way.

It is clear that the artists could not help but feed on international culture and create through Western aesthetic and formal influences, but if we send our memory back to the early twentieth century, we cannot help but think of Picasso and Cubism to draw similar conclusions.

The entire fabric of the historical avant-gardes has been able to regenerate itself with African aesthetics and now the new generations are taking the opposite path, regenerating themselves through our culture and proposing themselves as a new program for this millennium.

All artists are bearers of social themes, more or less evident, because, fundamentally, the ethnic problem is not yet resolved, as well as that of religious coexistence and the coexistence of peoples. And yet, in an almost "neutral" terrain such as that of art, different cultures, distant ethnic groups and even opposing lifestyles and ways of thinking could coexist.

Our task is to make known and convey to the public realities that otherwise would not be known and would not meet.