Time is Love | Group Exhibition

A spring exhibition featuring three artists from the African Continent happening in Spain at Out of Africa Gallery.
Texts by the art critic Sylvain Sankalé

HENRI ABRAHAM UNIVERS
Born in 1974 in Paris 8th, France Lives and works in London, UK

Henri Abraham, Africa blues, 2020

When you have lived a hundred lives, in a hundred places around the world, is it any wonder that you would choose to call yourself Henri Abraham Univers?
Henri Abraham’s origins are in France and Burkina Faso. He studied cinema and practised many trades in his life among these countries and other places (notably the Ivory Coast and London where he currently lives.) Is it surprising then that he would become a fine artist whose works express something universal and cosmic?

Arriving late to fine arts creation and after exploring other forms of artistic expression, Henri Abraham Univers realized that painting was his path. As he was approaching his forties in 2013, he left all his other activities to devote himself to this path.
Encouraged by a Polish artist, he presented works for the highly selective exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, in London. To his surprise, after only a year of practice, he found himself there, among nearly twenty thousand other candidates.

Henri Abraham at Out of Africa Gallery

This event propelled Henri Abraham to the forefront with exhibitions in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Morocco, the United States, Belgium, Nigeria and others. His works were also acquired by collectors!
Although he also devotes himself to sculpture and other forms of visual art, it is through his painting that Henri Abraham Univers is known and recognized.

This event propelled Henri Abraham to the forefront with exhibitions in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Morocco, the United States, Belgium, Nigeria and others. His works were also acquired by collectors!
Although he also devotes himself to sculpture and other forms of visual art, it is through his painting that Henri Abraham Univers is known and recognized.
His paintings all bear the same meticulous trademark, whatever their format and theme; a starry vault which encourages us to want to always go further, always beyond what is immediately perceptible, while at the same time fills our minds with as many questions.
This is the most immediate of his “signatures”, a common thread that unites them together in the labyrinth of his creation, drawing his inspiration from all the world’s sources.

Finishing his canvases, once the motif has been executed, with this seedling of stars which occupy all the vacant space, is a form of priesthood for the artist.
His mission for the universal and his call for the unity of man and the world is constantly referenced by inscriptions throughout his works (“1 + 1 = 1”, “time is love”, “spider weaving thread of love”, “melanin found everywhere in all universes”, …); the theme of universalism returns again and again as a leitmotif which guides the painter in his life and in his work. The question is even more noticeable in this exhibition for which he has chosen to present us with a kaleidoscope of his creations and without a single theme. In fact, between political satire (Black president); references to the cosmogony of the Dogon of Mali (The cat, the bird, and the calf); the sacred hornbill bird of the Senufo (mainly from the Ivory Coast) and allusions to the Mossi culture of his father, with its improbable blue Biiga (fertility doll) … the field of possibilities is wide and the artist explores it without reluctance!
His work is unclassifiable as it breaks from the codes of fashion and current artistic trends. If he evokes Africa, he does not dedicate himself exclusively to it and the artist clearly shows his vocation for the universal with his work beyond time and space.

The construction of his paintings is original and variable, even when the technique remains the same, happily changing the gesture, the perspective, the chromatic range from one work to another.
Only its infinite Milky Way points the way of the profane in his endless search. And there is the artist, in the shadows, and he is the one who leads him by the hand!

PRINCE GALLA GNOHITE
Born in 1989 in Ivory Coast. Lives and works in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

Prince Galla Gnohitè, detail of Regard attentif, 2021

The theme of “street children” — a phenomenon that is both common and often scandalous — can be found in the artistic creation of visual artists from a number of countries.
In the Ivory Coast, this was crystallized in the political and institutional crisis which destabilized the social structures of this country for several years and swarms of children and adolescents into the streets, condemned to live and to “play” at war, but with real weapons. We call these children “microbes” or “grazers”.
Fortunately, peace has returned, weapons are now toys and the children of poor neighbourhoods are, like all children in the world, in search of age-appropriate pleasures and diversions, their ingenuity making up for their lack of resources. How the faces and attitudes of these children have changed!
We no longer see hunger or fear, but simply the innocence of children playing, sometimes marked by solemnity. Children whose favorite playground is the street, for want of another.
It is possible to trace commonalities as to the variations on this theme, which goes from Aboudia to Armand Boua, via Yeanzi, but beyond the theme, the treatment reserved by each differs significantly…it is not possible to confuse their works.
The children of Gnohite are no longer afraid, they have fun and delight in the joys of their youth with all the spontaneity of this blessed time of life, carefree and cheerful, despite the ugliness of the world around them.
The artist insists on capturing and preserving this happiness, this fullness, by referring to education, to the preparation of the adults of tomorrow, who had the chance, like him, thanks to his family environment, to enjoy a balanced education, who put his personal development first and did not interfere with his artistic aspirations.
In a swirl of large flat areas of primary and saturated colors (blue and yellow, mainly) whose playful character is reinforced by a myriad of dots and small circles of color, the main characters are sketched, suggested, schematized and perfectly recognizable for those who have seen children playing in the African sun and dust.
Prince Galla Gnohite considers Grobli Zirignon his teacher and from him, he borrowed the technique of scraping and washing out paint that was projected onto the canvas using a pipette, an instrument familiar to children.

Prince Galla Gnohitè at Out of Africa Gallery

The bicycle and its inevitable accidents and flat tires, the worn tires that we push, hoops for adults, to give the impression of driving a car, football, of course, but also struggle, or for the more relaxed, reading; a list of the daytime activities, themes of Gnohite’s work, which sometimes may be disrupted by the attack of a stray dog!
This work is distinguished from that of its predecessors by that happy vitality that we perceive from the start and which makes you want to dance in the dust and lead children from all over the world in the farandole.
Because, beyond the technical mastery, the chosen subject and its treatment, there emerges an infinite tenderness in Prince Galla Gnohite’s works, a form of nostalgia for the artist from a carefree and happy time in his life seen through the prism of transpositions.
Having trained from 2000 to 2004 at the Regional Center of Arts and Crafts of Abengourou (CRAMA) in the Ivory Coast, Prince Galla Gnohite, who is barely thirty years old, has acquired an indisputable technical mastery of his subjects, of the desired and obtained effects and of the composition of his works. He completed his training with the artist Youssouf De Kimbirila dit Le Quetzal, who believes Gnohite shows great promise and a brilliant future.
Gnohite also displays his talents in sculpture, design and decoration, and works in abstract, figurative and surrealist styles.
The curators were not mistaken in selecting Prince Galla Gnohite for important artistic events in the Ivory Coast, even though he was not yet twenty years old. His success has continued, receiving extensive attention for his exhibitions in Europe as well as other African countries.
This very sunny exhibition, in the grayness of our days, gives us color, light and comfort that we so badly need.

MÉNÉ
Born 1977, Ivory Coast Lives and works in Dabou (Ivory Coast)

Méné, Family, 2018

Méné continues to promenade the improbable silhouettes of his characters through his work and through our lives and we are grateful for the sweetness and the color he gives them. Graduate of INSAAC (Abidjan School of Fine Arts) and certified professor of fine arts, Méné goes his way, without unnecessary hype, but with stubbornness and talent.
More and more art collectors appreciate his many talents that are expressed in his high quality painted works. With Méné it’s about painting, the artist having never departed from this medium to express his feelings, visions, dreams and his moments of melancholy. Painting is surely his way of expressing emotions, a man in his forties, who does not speak much, is sparing in his gestures, laughter and tears. Everything is in the richly colored work, he has pursued for years.
We know him for his use of various supports, paper, canvas, plastic sheeting on which painters in building had left. Everything is good for him then, by the magic of color, reinterpret things and give them the turn he wanted.
Behind the apparent disorder of his works, one can find not only an excellent technical mastery but also an attention to composition which is all the more remarkable. The balance of the materials is really not random, nor is the chromaticism of the palette; it obeys a harmony that, without being classical, is absolutely undeniable. The artist’s success is in the ordering of apparent disorder and the works exhibited here are large enough to make this clear to the observer.

Although there are some in profile, most of his characters are presented from the front. All of Méné’s works are inhabited by humanoid characters, often said to have descended from some flying saucer, and yet they seem to belong to the same world as ourselves. Because it’s the human condition that’s in question here, of man, his kingdom, his community and his immediate environment.
The titles of these paintings are very evocative and reinforce our feelings of well-being and recognition. So is it with his “Earth of Men”, that the artist in his beatitude tells us, or in “Land of Love”, that these places that will never be dark, these spaces of freedom where the artist reflects, indicate a fundamental optimism which, while not overstated is no less sensitive and easily perceptible. There is at least, by exception, “A vision of another world”, whose hosts are more birds or fish than humans. This world is not scary, it is just different, other, and it does not seem to affect the artist anymore; he does not suggest anything to us, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Blues or pastels invite our eyes and suggest other approaches of these spaces of which only the artist has the key.

Méné at Out of Africa Gallery

“Dream World”, the title given to this series is very consistent despite the apparent dissimilarities among the works. Is it a world the artist saw in a dream and hastened to transpose it on the canvas or is it the world he dreams of, but has never seen? No one will ever know if it’s a vision of the past or of the future that it thus offers to our lust and to the lucubrations of our souls.
The colorful universe of Méné transports us and gives us so much pleasure, so many pretexts for sweet dreams that we are ready to follow, without thinking too much of the consequences, because we know his benevolence as a man and as an artist.
In this state of suspension of the active consciousness in which he engulfs us, crossing his universe brings us joy, strength and beauty and, somewhere, helps us to forget the real world that surrounds us and that makes us too rarely happy. Let us hasten to embark on this sweet ferry, like a boat on the limpid and quiet ocean and trust the rower, he knows the pitfalls, he knows the currents, he knows the way, he is initiated”.

END