PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU

OCA opens its season with Love Letter, a major exhibition by cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou, whose research has always focused on the environment, organized in collaboration with Galleria Continua and curated by Marco Bazzini and Emanuele Montibeller.

Pascale Marthine Tayou's exhibition

LOVE LETTER

In OCA’s large exhibition hall, the visitor comes face-to-face with a variety of sculptures, artefacts, objects and energies with heterogeneous and diverse natures, showing the multiform quality of Tayou’s visual language. It is a language based on archetypes, objects made or found that refer to both artisan craftsmanship and the remnants of a consumer society. In the exhibition, some examples of this language are the Poupée Pascale or the Bantu Towels, two iconic bodies of work that highlight a process based on cultural enrichment and hybridisation. On the walls, large colourful frescoes and Colorful Stones, 2019, speak of travel and the effects of globalisation, from which no one is safe. Other works include one of his most representative pieces, Plastic Bags, 2001-24, a monumental sculpture made from plastic bags, a symbol of consumerism and the pollution produced by our societies.

Tayou has created two large neon works specifically for the exhibition, including Love from Dynamo, 2024, a true act of love towards those who “serve human values” on a daily basis, in the words of the artist, starting with the nearby Dynamo Camp which shares a boundary with the OCA. But it is also a message of reciprocal generosity for the landscape that harmoniously hosts his exhibition.

All images: Courtesy of the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA

Biography

PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU

Born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon, in 1966, Tayou lives and works in Ghent, Belgium, and Yaoundé, Cameroon. Since the early 1990s and his participation in Documenta 11, Kassel (2002), and the Venice Biennale (2005 and 2009), a wide international audience has come to know Pascale Marthine Tayou’s work. It is distinguished by its variability, not limited to one medium or one particular set of themes. But although his themes may differ, they all use the person of the artist himself as a starting point.

His works not only mediate between cultures, or put man and nature in an ambivalent relationship with one another, but are produced with the awareness that they are social, cultural or political constructions. His work is deliberately mobile, avoiding pre-established schemes, heterogeneous. It is always closely linked to the idea of travel and contact with something other than oneself, and is so spontaneous, it almost seems random. Tayou’s objects, sculptures, installations, drawings and videos all have a recurring feature: they focus on an individual moving through the world and exploring the concept of the global village. It is within this context that Tayou negotiates his African origins and related expectations.