Stevenson presents Bilongue an exhibition of new work by Barthélémy Toguo – his third with the gallery, following Strange Fruit in Johannesburg in 2016, and Celebrations in Cape Town in 2014.
While the artist’s preceding exhibitions interrogated social malaise and revelled in ‘life with all its feelings’ respectively, Bilongue unites these preoccupations as Barthélémy Toguo pays homage to the sufferings and joys of the residents of a Cameroonian settlement facing unequitable conditions.
Barthélémy Toguo – Artist’s Statement
I chose the title of Bilongue because of the inhabitants of this neighbourhood in Douala. I lived and worked here for months in 2015 while preparing for All the World’s Futures, Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale. I met incredible people and told myself I had to come back to Bilongue to portray them.
These are people who left poor cities to come to Douala and figure themselves out. They came to settle down in a very challenging area. And they live there and survive there daily, not through violence but through solidarity. When there is a need, one runs to help the other. It is a flat area so there is a lot of stagnant water. When water floods the house of a neighbour everyone helps them, and so it goes on.
I went to capture the images of their faces to tell them that in this difficult city of Douala, they exist as heroes.
The portrait form is employed throughout this exhibition as Toguo depicts the people of Bilongue on both wood and paper, crafting an enduring tribute.
In a new series of drawings, colonial-era photographs are placed at the centre of portraits delicately rendered in ink and watercolour and bordered by idiomatic phrases of common wisdom. Portraying schools, rivers, trading posts, settlements and plantations, the photographs function as reminders of the colonial encounter and its residual impact. Yet Toguo resists a tableau of victimhood, foregrounding instead the persistence of insightfulness and dignity within adversarial systemic conditions.
Barthélémy Toguo’s wood carvings take this notion further.
Sculpted from the Bibolo trees common to his hometown of Bandjoun, each person’s features are interpretively chiselled by the artist as he sought to capture the emotional specificity in Bilongue’s people, affirming an iconography of the everyman.
“It was a way to come back to the academic training I received 30 years ago in the Ivory Coast, when I had to copy the Dying Slave of Michelangelo, among other works. And myself, I wanted to portray the people of Bilongue as heroes. Differences are important in this carving ensemble – it’s important to have exaggeration in the faces, in the cheeks, in the eyes or the neck or the teeth. When you look at an individual you capture a communication in the making and that’s what is important: the soul of the people and what they left within me.”
Toguo uses the striations of the wood to emphasise what is unique in each face, adding: ‘I felt pleasure seeing the magic coming to life, coming out of the wood.’ These carved portraits will be a focus of Toguo’s upcoming exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris in September.
Alongside the Bilongue portraits are Toguo’s signature watercolour paintings, which convey his longstanding commitment to articulating the complexity of experience. As stated in a conversation at the time of his exhibition Déluge at Carré Sainte-Anne, Montpellier, in 2016:
“My formal propositions, my ethical process, my aesthetic vocabulary converge in the long run to go towards the other, the others, with empathy; this is what drives my creative work, and I identify with what Camus said when he received the Nobel Prize: ‘In my eyes, art is not a solitary pleasure. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings.’”
OPENING: The exhibition will open on Thursday 23 January, 6 to 8pm.
WALKABOUT: The artist will present a walkabout of the exhibition on Friday 24 January at 12pm
WHERE: Stevenson, Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925
WHEN: 23 January – 7 March 2020 HOURS: Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and Saturday 10am to 1pm.
INFO: T 021 462 1500 E info@stevenson.info Visit
Barthélémy Togu Biography
Toguo was born in 1967 in Cameroon and lives between Paris and Bandjoun. He trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; the École Supérieure d’Art in Grenoble, France; and the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Germany. He founded Bandjoun Station, a centre for artistic exchange between local and international artists featuring residencies, an exhibition space, a library and plantations in Bandjoun, Cameroon, in 2007.
Solo shows have taken place at institutions including the Parish Art Museum, New York; Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden; Musée d’art contemporain de Sainte Etiennne, France; La Verrière by Hermès, Brussels, Belgium; Fundaçao Gulbenkian, Lisbon; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Notable group shows include Taming Y/Our Passion, the fourth Aichi Triennale, Japan (2019); IncarNations: African Art as Philosophy, BOZAR Centre for Arts, Brussels (2019); Perilous Bodies, Ford Foundation Gallery, New York (2019); Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life, the fourth edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018); the 7th Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, Japan (2018); Homo Planta at Fondation Blachère (2018); The Red Hour, the 13th Dakar Biennale (2018); Art/ Afrique, le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton (2017); All The World’s Futures at the Venice Biennale (2015); Body Language at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2013); La Triennale: Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); the 11th Havana Biennial (2012); A terrible beauty is born, 11th Biennale de Lyon, France; the 18th Sydney Biennale (2011); and Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery, London (2008).
In 2011, Toguo was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature in France. He was shortlisted for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2016.
