DIEUDONNE FOKOU
METAMORPHOSE
GALERIE CAROLE KVASNEVSKI
06 APRIL - 11 OCTOBER 2020
Cheikh Hamidou Kane writes in l'Aventure ambiguë: "Sometimes, metamorphosis does not end, it installs us in the hybrid and leaves us there. It is in this field of the vast and the possible that Dieudonné Fokou lives, he seizes the tortured, wounded...rejected matter. He is not afraid to look at it, the better he begins to love it. An alchemist, he burns, tortures, cuts, welds, glues these abandoned objects.
From this troubling marriage, beyond the recycling he plays with, he questions fertility, sexuality and its taboos, the conflict that affects his country, the waste of the market economy, and finally these borders that are closed to migrants but open against the current to rubbish, as a final arm of honour to tolerance and brotherhood.
He lovingly collects the metallic carcasses, the plastic bags that suffocate our planet as well as the "lost bullets" & the old computers that are discarded in Cameroon and elsewhere... Where many people close their eyes, Dieudonné tirelessly continues, he responds the same way Camus did in his essay "the myth of Sisyphus" in the face of the absurd: revolt.
Whether he is a sculptor or a painter, he remains in a process of permanent transformation, using and reusing waste, he shows us that the object, like organic life, forms a cyclical force that leads to rebirth.
Each creation is hybrid, a tangle of wire that forms a cerebral cortex, a ball that seems to freeze on a face in metallic decomposition, a maternity made of a mosaic of plastic... Dieudonné merges genres and materials.
From this troubling marriage, beyond the recycling it plays with, it questions fertility, sexuality and its taboos, the conflict that affects his country, the wastefulness of the market economy, and finally those borders that are closed to migrants but open against the current to rubbish, as a final flip off to tolerance and brotherhood.