The exhibition “Aboudia e Yeanzi: In Transit”, promoted by Lis10 Gallery, in collaboration with VOGA, and curated by Alessandro Romanini and Fabio Migliorati, will open on Saturday 1st October from 12:00 to 20:00 in the new venue of via Cavour 5, Arezzo.

After an annus mirabilis that saw them, as representatives of their country, first at the Venice Biennale and then at the Dakar Biennale, the two Ivorian artists have decided to fulfill a promise made last April, before the inauguration of the great lagoon event. Aboudia and Yeanzi had in fact manifested their desire to create in Arezzo – among the masterpieces of Giorgio Vasari and Lorenzetti – some works destined to the National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and Lis10 Gallery had ensured that the artists could work in the Palazzo della Provincia, a few hundred meters from the Christ of Cimabue and the Magdalene of Piero della Francesca.

With this exhibition, Aboudia and Yeanzi return to the city that has witnessed the production of their images during the poetic “Aretine walks” dedicated to the discussion on the masterpieces of the Tuscan Renaissance. The exhibition was conceived for the spots of Arezzo, as a form of tribute to the history of this territory: it consists of a cycle of paintings on canvas and on paper of various sizes, gathered under the title “In Transit”. The transit, the movement, the journey… the power of vision, that is essential to formulate the desired style, is all here.

Thus, in space and time, color and line are employed to chase those gestures that best interpret contemporary African art and culture. Artists seem to rediscover a spirit that guides them; and it is easily found as it simply animates them. They are complete protagonists who tell their stories from afar.

They are ready to be led to the oldest stages of a modernity that they evoke and invoke, and to get close to phenomena that are constantly static, precisely because always subject to metamorphosis.

The origin of (their) everything is, in short, a kind of sacred movement: incessant movement, internal or exogenous migration, which corresponds to a continuous transit of cultural, linguistic and iconographic exchanges between the 54 countries that make up Africa. And it is the same diaspora that relives in the many African artists in transit between European countries, merging their millennial roots of identity with Western iconography, creating new and hybrid languages.

The exhibition also includes some four-hands works – cycle started during the stay in Arezzo – destined to auction sales with the intention to donate most of the revenue to institutions devoted to childcare.

Abidjan, Venice, Arezzo: different symbols of the same culture. Because the destination of culture, after all, is only origin.

Lis10 Gallery chooses Arezzo for a formula of transversal culture, which combines the attachment to Tuscan roots and their enhancement, to today’s African art: a glocal formula that aims to represent Africa from Arezzo, and, at the same time, to represent Arezzo in the world.