Opening reception: Saturday 27 April 18:00-20:00

30 April – 25 May 2024

Tue – Fri 11:00-18:00 ⏐ Sat 11:00-17:00

Maurice Mboa reads the signs of life here and hereafter. His works reflect the shimmering boundary between souls and ourselves. For some years now, he has been expressing his very particular perception in a series he calls “âmes peintes” (painted souls). They are imprints, without real faces, like so many potential portraits. On metal plates used in the printing industry, he paints and engraves figures caught in foliage. In this way, he reconstitutes the crowd of those we have lost and those we do not yet know.

These silhouettes have no gaze; they shine with ours. Their features are as elegant as they are indistinct. The heads of the characters are traversed by vertical lines, their physiognomies are singular. Each of them is different, yet faceless. The silhouettes are representated in the wild, and are of the same essence as the vegetation that surrounds them. The figures do not stand out from the background; the ornamental treatment in flatness becomes a philosophical element. These souls are everywhere. Life pervades everything and binds beings to the living. All spaces are linked in Maurice Mboa’s works to give us a saturated reflection of the world.

The artist conveys his strong intuition by inventing a way of working as well as a decorative system. As in other practices, Maurice Mboa’s works become the patient expression of work and meditation. The repetitive motifs are as much an exercise in regularity as fragments of a smooth, complex pattern. His naturalistic vision unfolds on an artificial and cold surface. Metal seems to oppose the warm, tender emotionality of the colors. It evokes the future and the mechanical, whereas the warm tones find a simple connection with the past and the imaginary, even a form of comfort. One blends into the other, reminding us that the past only exists in the present. Souls only speak among the living.

Maurice Mboa’s works open a door onto the images of a hidden world. They are subtly inscribed in a philosophy that has always wanted to read in artistic practice an additional space for the expression of our inevitable finitude. The artist rediscovers his role as a passer of images from reality to a beyond. He nourishes our gaze by adding to the space his works that will share a destiny beyond our own. Each of them was not there before us, but will surely be afterwards. They are like mirrors freezing the tragic dissociation that makes us filters of forces we cannot control, but which we surely feel.

By inventing a practice, perfecting a technique, and deploying forms that are his own, Maurice Mboa explores this border between worlds at his own pace. After laying down the colors, he traverses and chisels them, following a process that only he can master. On the bodies of his “âmes peintes” (painted souls), he creates a regular succession of motifs, like a scansion. Torsos and limbs seem marked by a fateful archaic calendar. Maurice Mboa’s works are perhaps just as unsettling because, in a simple, familiar vocabulary, they make the little flame that holds us suspended here waver.

Samuel Gross

MAURICE MBOA

Maurice Mboa (b. 1983, Yaoundé, Cameroon) lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. His work has been exhibited in Africa, various European countries, the Middle East and America, including solo exhibitions at Pace Gallery in Geneva and at the Institut Français du Cameroun, as well as a group show at Nassima Landau Foundation in Tel Aviv, Israel. Mboa has also shown at the Biennale de Dakar in 2016.