Exhibition
Osvalde Lewat, Adjaratou Ouedraogo
Lumières Africaines
Galerie Penthièvre
On the occasion of its first participation in the 1-54 fair at Christies, the gallery is delighted to propose a conversation between the two African women artists Adjaratou Ouedraogo, painter and Osvalde Lewat, photographer, at the gallery, 24, rue de penthièvre, Paris. They are both featured in numerous collections of contemporary African art.
Osvalde Lewat was born in Gaoura, Cameroon.
The photo series Night Colour is the result of multiple and contradictory desires. It is the idea of capturing the centre but also giving life to the outside. To highlight and conceal. To erase the visible and apprehend the unsuspected. Telling and not telling.
Dichotomy. Dialectic. Photography here is an infinite field of possibilities and feeds the photographer?s tireless quest for meaning. Sense of the world. Sense of things. Sense of the Other. Sense of time. Sense of History. These photos are both resistance and provocation. The African continent needs images of itself, lucid or fantasized images, but above all protean images. Too often, it has only been shown images taken by others, focused on its misfortunes, its exoticism.
These photos, in the heart of the African light, state a refusal to be objectified through the prism of exteriorities that assign the peoples of Africa «to the heart of darkness ». They transmit the fire of life, of beauty, of hope. Yes, in Africa the lights shine even when the night seems dark.
Born in Lomé, in Togo, Adjaratou Ouedraogo lives and works in Ougadougou in Burkina Faso.
Since 2000, the artist has been developing her practice in several mediums, including mainly painting, drawing and sculpture. A free woman, she has always preserved her solitude to explore materials and colours. In her lively and colourful paintings, we find the polychromy of African fabrics, wax, in the image of Klimt, who incorporated into his works all the avant-garde fabrics of the Viennese Secession.
His creative process is singular; it begins with a work of abstraction. The artist elaborates colours, shapes, balances and spaces. Emerging from her personal history, the figures of her childhood gradually appear, which she seeks to repair.
She revolutionizes the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, invents a lively and poetic writing and explores a new voice in contemporary African art. She wants to change the order of things.
