A “postmodern” conceptual artist, Georges Adéagbo begins with collecting miscellaneous elements taken from his close environment or during walks: found objects of daily life, abandoned pieces of clothing, books, magazines, newspapers, salvaged records but also masks, statues and paintings he commissions from the painters and sculptors of Ouidah and Cotonou (Benin). The whole forms a mental archive that the artist arranges in the various exhibition spaces he has at his disposal, an archive voluntary de-hierarchising in which the banal sits alongside a culture produced by other artists, poets and intellectuals from his century. On an equal footing, the various elements form what could be called an archaeology of the present, still in progress, a poetic history of humanity as it is experienced by the “person of Georges Adéagbo”.

The first room of the gallery—6 rue du Pont de Lodi—aims to highlight the various emblematic “constellations” produced in reference to some of the most famous installations made by Georges Adéagbo. A kind of retrospective preamble that repositions the latter in his own history as well as in the broader history of contemporary art of the last thirty years. Under the glass ceiling, the artist presents what could be called the “Surrealisms of Georges Adéagbo”, that is a fresh rereading of the history of modernity largely influenced by the arts of Africa. This specific intervention is in keeping with the continuation of his project developed for the centenary of the publication of the First Surrealist Manifesto, in which the latter honors the modern forms produced by Western artists by placing them in the hands of artisans from Benin, with whom he’s been collaborating since the 1990s.

At the beginning of the 1920s and 1930s, the art revolutions of the avant-garde movements—Cubist then Surrealist—found in African statuary a “Magic realism” that was to radically transform the History of art and of representations. Collected, and taken away from their ritual function, the African statues and masks accumulated in galleries and museums, as well as in the display cabinets of collectors, are still potent from the ceremonies for which they had been fashioned. Split between the attraction of exoticism and the fascination for that brilliant invention of forms, modern artists saw in the simplification of bodies and faces, a possible revitalisation likely to feed their imagination. Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi, Francis Picabia, Man Ray and many others drew from that, the bases of art practices that were unexplored in Western art productions. At a time when the museums start sending back pieces from their collections to the original countries they belonged to as a final gesture of redress for the colonial policies of the past, Georges Adéagbo is proposing for us to take our gaze off the centre and this time to consider modern art from the perspective of Africa.

— Christian Alandete and Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin, curators of the exhibition

With the complicity of Atlantic Art Space by Marie-Sophie Eiché-Demester and of Stephan Koehler