For Paris Students, the Sky Will Always Be Blue

For this solo exhibition in Paris, Vincent Michéa took Schiller Paris students into a kaleidoscope that reorganizes space and time. From photomontage to painting, via photography and printed objects, in his works everything is linked, everything in dialogue, and everything part of a vast iconography, African but also European and American. In this exhibition, a gallery of portraits responds to each other and is articulated in particular around the city of Dakar, whose aesthetics and architecture at the crossroads of modernist and vernacular worlds have always fascinated the artist. The images Michéa constructs reveal an intimate and memorial relationship with his environment: he has lived between Paris and Dakar since the mid-1980s.

Well-known artist of the West African and Western scene, Vincent Michéa’s approach is unique as he has made the link between two capitals, in both his work and his life. Guided by a principle of pleasure, Michéa’s solo exhibition at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery in Paris revealed to Schiller students an artist with an irreverent commitment, a prodigy of the image and its polysemy, whose works vibrate with authenticity, joy, and melancholy. Between the pictorial space of his works and the real space of the world, the limit is as thin as an electric wire on a blue-sky background. These elements of architecture or urbanism under our eyes every day without us ever really seeing them, Michéa makes them the protagonists of his plastic narrative, the actors of his memory and his sensitive link with Dakar. Dakar and its always blue sky. 

About the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery  

The Cécile Fakhoury Gallery opened its doors in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in September 2012. In the spring of 2018, it inaugurated a new space in Dakar, Senegal, and a showroom in Paris, France. The gallery works to promote contemporary art on the African continent. It provides visibility to creativity and contemporary artistic diversity in Africa through its program of solo and group exhibitions, but also through its participation in international fairs and biennials and through its collaborations with foreign galleries. The artists represented by the gallery, with their respective identities and histories, are distinguished by a plastic language that frees itself from borders and refuses geographical stigmatization. Observers of a world of which they are the contemporaries, these artists carry an enlightened and critical glance on our society. The diversity of their aesthetic gestures – as movements committed to grasping the complexities of history – contributes to the writing of a living memory of their countries and pushes us to reconsider our link to the world.