Galleria Giovanni Bonelli & LIS10 Gallery are pleased to invite you, in the magical setting of Collectors Night in Pietrasanta, to the opening of the new exhibition dedicated to contemporary African art. An exhibition that intends to operate on the fruitful wave of paradox, attempting to stage, to fix in a snapshot a living matter in constant becoming, which genetically refuses to be enclosed in categories or stages while not renouncing a theatricality that is ritual and not mere aesthetic-exhibitionist element.
The group of artists gathered for the occasion testifies in their work to a postmedialism that is not the assimilation of a Western status in artistic debate, but a genetic condition, linked to the magical dimension of artistic action, inseparable from their creative process. Hence the free and unconditional use of media and supports, of materials and techniques, genres and registers, often synergistically crossed in the same work, where the categories and distinctions between the arts of space and the arts of time fall away and where the logical-geometrical artifices from perspective to gestalt schemes, skip in favour of an expressive all-over that invests the surfaces entirely.
From the documentary register and the anthropological spirit that looks more to history than to the chronicle of the photographs of the Malian Malick Sidibè, through the pioneering works of the 'fathers and mothers' of contemporary African art such as the Ivorian Frédéric Bruly Bouabré and his picto-graphic 'postcards' linked to the Beté people, the Congolese Chéri Samba with his paintings thematically linked to his land, the Senegalese Seni Awa Camara with her sculptures still made following shamanic rites in the forest. Gonçalo Mabunda's masks and thrones, plastic sublimations of Mozambican civil conflicts, find their place on the exhibition stage alongside the more expressively subversive and stylistically fashionable dimensions of cosmopolitan figures such as the Ivorian Aboudia, who has established himself firmly on the international art scene, and those of his compatriot Armand Boua and Cameroonian Bernard Ajarb, among others. The exhibition will be open until 22 August and is accompanied by a critical text by the curator.
Works by: Aboudia, Bernard Ajarb, Nu Barreto, Armand Boua, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Seni Awa Camara, Soly Cissé, Lovemore Kambudzi, Gonçalo Mabunda, Esther Mahalangu, Cheri Samba.
