Fragments of an intimate story with Revue Noire

By Joël Andrianomearisoa

Dakar Biennial 2016

The glue of time scrolls the crammed pages of a history without a capital ’H’. From African contemporary art to African contemporary expressions. The paternal sentiment get lost in it, only to be reborn into filial sentiment.

  
Today, we are not the fathers of Revue Noire, but its offspring. Time, which we thought eternal, has closed around the adventure of another way to feel and discover. Finally, as its sole unsuspected consequence: progeny.
  
The future?

The herds of personal ambitions have replaced the herds of collective ambitions. Without restraining the fertility of time, of each time. In our society, sterility remains the enduring prerogative of those who believe that they understand it and govern it, while observing from afar what cannot any longer be and even less what will be. Attempting to put words onto concepts which refuse to let themselves be confined. For the world of forms is indeed the one of the concepts which refuse to be locked by the equation of words without literature.

Here in Dakar, for this biennial which has been so dear - essential - to us since its beginning, our filiation is affirmed by Joël Andrianomearisoa. He will go through his private memories and through the grand library of whole or partial images of Revue Noire, the elements which he will build his ’Maison Sentimentale’.

Fragments, materials, words lost and recovered, a new music of forms in thousands of full and empty pages, little and immense, accompanies us in this long hall now gallery. Not a ’Galerie des Glaces’ (a Hall of Mirrors) to self-reflection but a walk without any reflection of the night, just the depth of mystery.

  
by Jean Loup Pivin
  
  
'La Maison Sentimentale', Joel Andrianomearisoa, Gallery Le Manège, Dakar, 2016 © photo Adji Dieye
[run the slideshow below]