LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery is pleased to present Neo Dan, a Solo Show by Obou Gbais from May 15 to June 29, 2024 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Born in the mountainous region of Man in western Ivory Coast, Obou Gbais graduated from the Fine Arts School in Abidjan in 2014 and now pursues his career between Germany and Ivory Coast. Remaining deeply attached to his roots, Obou Gbais blends the strong markers of Dan culture with a distinctly modern, pop, and captivating touch throughout his exhibitions. With Neo Dan, the features of the Dan mask are infused with a new energy and great vitality.
Obou pays homage to the sculptor’s ideal, who seeks to satisfy his quest for perfection by meticulously adjusting each ornament on the piece he creates. Inspired by Dan women, who are known for their features’ delicacy, the impossibility of conveying a face’s vitality nevertheless reflects back to him the vanity of his quest.
The mask asserts itself as the artist matures. More confident and expressive, less static, it comes to life and is animated by the expressions and passions of those who wear it. This Dan mask, whose original function is neither to frighten nor to render justice, but rather to welcome and amaze, finds a new momentum in this expressiveness. The repetition of geometric patterns - a tribute to his father who was a mathematics teacher - accompanies the folds of the "sapes", as he likes to call clothing, with the unsettling movement of an optical illusion.
Like this festive mask, the canvases are an invitation to a contemporary dance. Constantly juggling between his traditional roots and the development of a mixed and contemporary Ivorian culture, Obou spontaneously combines different sources of inspiration.
As you may have noticed, Obou is everywhere, on the streets, on social media, in neighborhoods and museums. His accessibility, which he is proud to display, and his popularity go hand in hand with his artistic identity. Painting, sculpture, drawing, music: each medium is an opportunity for him to build a bridge between the culture that shaped him and the one he has adopted.
By appropriating the codes of European neoclassical portraiture, Obou inscribed himself in a long tradition of painters whose practice was dictated by the restraint of emotion and a refusal to depict soulful passions. However, the artist breaks free from the inherent limits of his own practice and exploits all the freedom that the humanization of the mask allows him. By reinjecting the essence of life into its features, it’s no longer one but a thousand masks and as many emotions that escape from them.
By pushing expressiveness to the point of distorting the features and making them grimace, Obou gives the mask a new power: self-awareness. Thanks to the strangeness of these colorful figures, he plays with the viewer's natural empathy. The mask is close, so close that the viewer instinctively reproduces the distorted mouth, the crinkled eye, the wrinkled nose. The relationship thus established, the "grimasks" are no longer just representations of intense passions. They reveal the communicative power of the face through the richness of its expressions, variations and deformations.
Thus animated, the mask skillfully treads the line between conveying emotion and risking caricature. The spontaneity and expressiveness so characteristic of Obou's work then serve his desire to translate the intensity of inner life, to reveal powerful emotions through strong expressions. As if the masks were finally falling away.
