For Hyacinthe Ouattara, creation is both a necessity and a call, an energy, a form, a force. Following in the footsteps of his work on links, the artist offers us poetic manifestations that respond to each other, playing with form and material.
The artist travels through time in search of the moment to capture, and tells us stories at the border between reality and the spiritual world. Her raw materials are ancestral, her memories and the in-between worlds where the story is told. To these inspirations are added the writings of Edouard Glissant, whose words resonate particularly with the narratives and forces with which Hyacinthe Ouattara's works are charged.
He thus proposes an artistic language at odds with the aesthetic on the cusp of art brut that he observed in Burkina Faso. In his use of fabric, there is a progressive emancipation of the material, illustrated by the thread. Everything is linked to movement in space. Hyacinthe Ouattara carries on a poetic conversation with his surroundings. Gradually, he creates a human constellation without judgment or boundaries. An agglomeration of past stories that form the poetry of connection, an omnipresent theme in Hyacinthe Ouattara's work. The artist frees himself from traditional forms and interweaves narratives, even going so far as to solicit the words of the spirits of the earth. La Mémoire du Monde also hosts Les Battements Cardiaques de la Terre, a project carried out in Diébougou in the summer of 2023, in which the artist creates a series of paintings that he buries and leaves to the free expression of the elements.
The exhibition takes the form of a journey through the inhabited universe of Hyacinthe Ouattara. An anthology of series connected to one another by the memories he archives in the material. Fabric blends with painting to create La Mémoire du Monde by Hyacinthe Ouattara, on view from January 6 to February 24, 2024.
