The Cecile Fakhoury art gallery in Paris sits on one of the fanciest streets in the French capital, sharing a neighbourhood with the Élysée Palace – the official residence of the president – and Le Bristol hotel, the five-star haunt of film stars and other celebrities.
The Paris gallery is one of three entities set up to showcase art from countries including Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and others. The first Galerie Cecile Fakhoury, which bears the name of its French founder, was launched in Abidjan in 2012, and some six years later, a second space in Dakar, Senegal, was inaugurated, with a showroom in Paris following soon afterward.
That showroom has now transitioned into the Paris gallery on the chic avenue Matignon. Its current exhibition, Le pays de Cocagne, features the work of 10 artists and provides an antidote to the greyness of the French winter, according to gallery director and curator Francis Coraboeuf.
Other artists featured are Thibaud Bouedjoro-Camus, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Yo-Yo Gonthier, Carl-Edouard Keïta, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, Vincent Michéa, Kassou Seydou and Ouattara Watts.
SWAN spoke with Càraboeuf about the exhibition and about the role of the Cecile Fakhoury galleries in highlighting contemporary African art globally. The edited interview, conducted in person in Paris, follows.
SWAN: Please tell us about the artists and paintings on display.
FRANCIS CORABOEUF: All of the artists represented by the gallery have something in common, which is Western Africa - as a geographical, human, cultural common ground. Many of the artists live in different places, or have a background that is diverse, so you have all the situations that you can imagine, and that reflects the complexity of today’s world. When you go to Abidjan, or to Dakar, those are cities that are cosmopolitan, with people coming from everywhere in the world, and they reflect colonial history and colonization, but also pre-colonial history and recent history, which is one of circulation, migration.
The artist Rachel Marsil, for instance, was born in France, of a French mother and a father originally from Western Africa (she doesn’t know her father). But her work is a kind of identity research, and that is why she was attracted by Western Africa and why her work is oriented towards this region of the world. She and the gallery wanted to work together because those subjects of identity, history, geography, what are we doing here and where are we going - these are questions that the artists of the gallery are constantly raising.
FC: This is a group exhibition, and I wanted to present the work of different artists that have a presence right now in Paris, to create an echo, and also to gather some works that are all channelling an idea of warmth, of happiness, of positivity. It’s a response to this time of the year; it’s a response also to how can we create an echo to what’s happening in Dakar and in Abidjan and how do we take people from here and orient their gaze towards Western Africa.
“Pays de Cocagne” refers to an imaginary land, which is a land filled with abundance and dreams, and it’s a utopic place. This is a more subtle approach to the evocation of Western Africa, which is often exoticized. At the gallery, when we present the works of the artists in France, we often confront the clichés that people have toward Westen African countries. So, there’s a kind of deconstruction.
SWAN: How did you go about choosing the works?
FC: The idea was to create a group where the works would echo one another. The exhibition gathers work from very young artists (for example, Rachel Marsil is under 30) and also from artists such as Souleyman Keïta, who died in 2014 and is considered to be someone at the intersection between the modern art scene and the contemporary art scene.
The title of his work here is “Voyage à Mali”, and I wanted to include this work because I thought it was important to show some works by Souleymane Keïta in Paris, as we’re in this process of reevaluating, revalorising his work - on conceptual, historical and art-market levels. This painting is interesting because it was created between 1980 and 1985, in New York where he was living at the time, and he was evoking his roots which are in Mali, although he was born on the island of Gorée (off the coast of Senegal).
SWAN: There is also another Keïta in the exhibition, Carl-Edouard Keïta, the Ivorian-born, New York-based artist who is influenced by Cubism and portrays a fantastical world in his art…?
FC: Yes, Carl-Edouard Keïta is represented in this exhibition, and he will also have his first solo show in Abidjan at the Cecile Fakhoury gallery there - titled Goumbé, from 13 February to 12 April. The works in that show draw inspiration from cultural associations that were founded by migrants of the Ivoirian interior and other areas during the post-independence years. (Information about Goumbé can be found here: https://cecilefakhoury.com/exhibitions/117-goumbe-carl-edouard-keita-abidjan/overview/)
SWAN: What do you hope visitors will take away from “Pays de Cocagne”?
FC: It’s important for people to understand where these artists stand in the history of art. When I went to university and studied art history, what I studied didn’t give me the tools to understand how things are interconnected. So, this is what we do, or try to do as gallerists.
Pays de Cocagne runs until March 29 in Paris.
Photos (by AM/SWAN), top to bottom: Works in the exhibition; Paris gallery director Francis Coraboeuf, with paintings by Rachel Marsil and Souleymane Keïta; other paintings in the exhibition.
