The exhibition incorporates a sequence of terracotta sculptures created between 2021 and 2023, organized in a nonlinear and nonhierarchical method, peacefully resting on brick-built plinths and a cumulative mattress of soil: a constellation that evokes a soundless atmosphere midway between a lunar panorama and a sacred burial floor. By way of his sculptural language impregnated with magic realism, Fotso Nyie employs clay as a vessel for storytelling, the place the encounter with the spirits of the ancestors occurs by means of the dimension of goals—an oneiric realm the place private and collective reminiscences intertwine with uncanny visions, hinting at a future time. 

His anthropomorphic figures are rendered in double-backed clay of a darkish tone with a clean waxed end, embodying a robust iconography aligned with the brand new modern figuration and imbued, on the identical time, with references and sensibilities sourced from Pan-African vernacular tradition, significantly the religious information of West Africa.

Interweaving a biographical narrative with the collective unease surrounding the displaced heritage of African artwork and artifacts, Fotso Nyie’s sculptures are primarily self-portraits that imaginatively mix with figures formed as conventional African sculptures, untrue reproductions of the wooden statuettes that he collects from flea markets or that he observes within the archives of ethnographic museums.

At a time by which museums are rising up throughout Africa to repatriate artifacts trapped in European ethnographic museums, the highly effective physique of works offered in “Rêve Lucide” etches tales of fragility and resilience that envision a technique of collective therapeutic and an imminent reconciliation with ancestral values. 

at P420, Bologna
till September 9, 2023