art

born in 1967 in Cameroon

lives and works in Ghent, Belgium

Pascale Marthine Tayou and Revue Noire is a common story which dates from 1994 when he stormed the cover of the magazine RN13 Cameroon in June 1994. Then in the following years the exhibitions ’African Artists and AIDS’ in Benin and at the Dakar biennial in 1995,  ’African Suites’ at the Couvent des Cordeliers in Paris in 1997 and the movie ’Looobhy’ (Revue Noire and Arte, 1997) sow small white stones of a common story from side to side, in the lives of everyone remembers to another.

Tayou seal it in a new work / installation on paper printed a story of contemporary African art that becomes pierce, impaled stack on a steel axis, indecent, on multiple steel axes ascend to heaven, leaves with sharp-edged a impossible reading. Pascale Marthine Tayou shows us since long time his maze of rants, his invented fetishes that make him an artist, certainly from Africa but sharer another more urban reality, more focused on becoming, more common, likely to make other ways of looking. This is to state a present time without being Contemporary Art, not scorned, but simply seen as a current expression among others.

[run the slideshow below]

 For a little over a decade, Contemporary Art includes expressions of artists from elsewhere. Some see a healing of Western art wearied by his increasingly artificial ’breaks’, others see the 'duty' of repentance to 'plunder' of African forms that Modern Art did in the early twentieth century. Regardless, Tayou has this lightness to not getting caught up and play with the evidence to make it mysterious or make sense of each shot in a ratio between its manufacture and the ear of the professional - curator or critical -, of the buyer - collector or dealer -, of the beholder - Pekin not Pekinese-. Pascal Marthine Tayou is now in the Gulf Stream and in the market for contemporary art.

Each Tayou’s work has his own truth, but it is long it may have a sensible and sensitive shared value whose laborious demonstration is absent as well as the critical reference to the game of cultivated references. Pascal Marthine Tayou likes to say he 'makes stuff, does things. The surrealists, not know. The recuperation art, I don’t care. The history of art? 'Nay. To say this is not to ignore but to affirm the autonomy of his own eyes and to escape the simplistic classifications. And even when he literally quotes, he will do it with 'kitsch' to properly assert the freedom of thought. That did not stop he is flipping the universe of Western forms and of the world, less to draw any inspiration that he has since a long time, than to multiply opportunities for meetings he will master the rules.

We then say that in the abundance of the Pascale Marthine Tayou’s work, there is this work in ’abyss’ pissing blasphemy blood in the little house Revue Noire in Montparnasse, between Lille and Venice, Lyon and Ghent, Shanghai and Douala.

by Jean Loup Pivin, February 2011

LIENS

Site officiel de l’artiste / www.pascalemarthinetayou.com

Artist galerie  / www.galleriacontinua.com

Revue Noire Publishing