Victor Fotso Nyie: Rêve Lucide, Opentour 2023: Le Onde
P420, Bologna
June 22 – September 9, 2023
Press release
Victor Fotso Nyie, Rêve Lucide, 2023. Installation view at P420, Bologna.
Courtesy P420, Bologna.
VICTOR FOTSO NYIE
Rêve Lucide
P420 presents the first solo exhibition by the Cameroonian sculptor Victor Fotso Nyie (Douala, 1990; lives and works between Faenza and Rieti, IT).
The exhibition features a series of terracotta sculptures created between 2021 and 2023, arranged in a nonlinear and nonhierarchical manner, peacefully resting on brick-built plinths and a cumulative bed of soil: a constellation that evokes a soundless environment halfway between a lunar landscape and a sacred burial ground. Through his sculptural language impregnated with magic realism, Fotso Nyie employs clay as a vessel for storytelling, where the encounter with the spirits of the ancestors happens through the dimension of dreams — an oneiric realm where personal and collective memories intertwine with uncanny visions, hinting at a future time.
His anthropomorphic figures are rendered in double-baked clay of a dark tone with a smooth waxed finish, embodying a powerful iconography aligned with the new contemporary figuration and imbued, at the same time, with references and sensibilities sourced from Pan-African vernacular culture, particularly the spiritual knowledge of West Africa.
Interweaving a biographical narrative with the collective unease surrounding the displaced heritage of African art and artifacts, Fotso Nyie’s sculptures are primarily self-portraits that imaginatively blend with figures shaped as traditional African sculptures, unfaithful reproductions of the wood statuettes that he collects from flea markets or that he observes in the archives of ethnographic museums.
At a time in which museums are rising up across Africa to repatriate artifacts trapped in European ethnographic museums, the powerful body of works presented in Rêve Lucide etches tales of fragility and resilience that envision a process of collective healing and an imminent reconciliation with ancestral values.
Victor Fotso Nyie, Rêve lucide, 2021, ceramic and gold, cm.32x42x35.
Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna.
Victor Fotso Nyie, Purificazione, 2022, glazed ceramics, cm.73×23,5×33.
Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna.
Victor Fotso Nyie, Rêve Lucide, 2023. Installation view at P420, Bologna.
Courtesy P420, Bologna.
Victor Fotso Nyie, Rêve Lucide, 2023. Installation view at P420, Bologna.
Courtesy P420, Bologna.
Opentour 2023, Le onde, 2023. Installation view at P420, Bologna.
Courtesy P420, Bologna.
Opentour 2023, Le onde, 2023. Installation view at P420, Bologna.
Courtesy P420, Bologna.
LE ONDE
Opentour 2023
Le Onde, a title borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s novel, is an exhibition that includes the work of nine artists, exhibiting works created with different languages: Veronica Bragalini a series of graphics in which abstraction and self-portraiture contaminate each other; Riccardo Brevini some sculptures whose form derives from the energy of the bursting of firecrackers in matter; Sara Cortesi sculptures marked by a strong organicity, with natural materials that seem to re-emerge from the seabed; Cecilia Grelli a series of paintings where a few signs and strokes of paint configure minimal, fragile and unstable images; Giulia Querin an installation of ceramic sculptures that draw, through the repeated image of the hand, a map of forces in balance on a portion of floor and walls; Jingyan Ding two paintings in which there seems to be a proliferation of liquid forms capable of expanding in every area of the surface; Lucia Letizia Perillo a series of textiles on which sketches of landscapes and architecture seen from a train window are transferred with the agile and rapid stroke of the pyrograph; Siyang Jiang a small installation with an anchor at its centre, which, embedded in the wall, becomes the exhibition’s energetic pivot; Anna Tappari a performance that superimposes different trajectories of the voice from the four corners of the space.
More than a theme, that of waves is a suggestion that sustains the exhibition on several levels: the shape of waves – regular and at the same time iridescent and vibratory – is found in that of many of the works on display; it determines a movement, a rhythm and a possibility of dialogue and proxemics between the works in terms of apparent uniformity or sudden variations, expansion or contraction, inevitable overlapping of the energy fields of the individual works.
As happens in Virginia Woolf’s novel with the voices of the characters, the exhibition seems to proceed by monologues and soliloquies, which can, however, merge, at different points in space, into a single flow.
Lucia Letizia Perillo, Religes, 2023, pyroengraving on synthetic velvet, 5 elements, cm.160×140 each.
Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna.
Sara Cortesi, Vitrail, 2023, agar agar, food colouring, clay, cm.25×55.
Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna.
Giulia Querin, NO SENSE OF PLACE. Intenzioni percettive, 2022, glazed ceramic, variable dimensions.
Courtesy the artist and P420, Bologna.
Victor Fotso Nyie: Rêve Lucide, Opentour 2023: Le Onde
P420, Bologna
June 22 – September 9, 2023
CREDITS
All images courtesy the artists and P420, Bologna.
Photo: Carlo Favero