The Cecile Fakhoury Gallery in Abidjan welcomes Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux for his new solo exhibition entitled “Au-delà du jardin, il y a la mer’ (Beyond the garden, there is the sea)”. Until December 28, the gallery presents nostalgic portraits of the artist revealing a distant gaze sometimes lost guessing the immensities of the world on the horizon or sometimes simply introspective.
Born in 1995 in Guadeloupe, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux organizes through his art a striking pictorial journey that interweaves these personal experiences but also the stories of the plural world. In an immersive visual, he takes the public into a singular universe populated by his childhood memories, adolescence and his family stories on the border of reality and imagination.
To return to the exhibition “Beyond the garden, there is the sea“, the contemporary artist throughout his career has evolved in an environment multicultural. Between his native country and his coastal residences in Dakar, via the Ivory Coast or the Grand Bassam, his creative practice has been imbued with this cultural mix specific to the waters of the Black Atlantic, a term referring to the book L’Atlantique noir. Modernité et double conscience by Paul Gilroy.
In this exhibition, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux presents the sea as a symbol of infinity and movement. Here, it becomes a metaphor for the mother and Mother Earth, evoking maternity, protection and transmission. A central figure in the work, it becomes a place of memory and origins, where the artist connects to his roots while looking towards the unknown. Indeed, his art practice is based around this nebulous point, the need, the desire to remain anchored to a matrix ancestry. A traditional identity composed of past and secret rites in perpetual renewal for a quest for contemporary meaning.
His work also offers an exploration of the multiple facets of the color black, which for him carries a symbolic weight. Beyond a skin color, it carries a heavy cultural interpretation according to the geographical position. For example, it symbolizes in different Afro-Caribbean and Indian spiritualities a divine color, the symbol of the kiss of the sun, coal black.
A primordial and cosmic color, a place of creation and destruction, black is the essential component of Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux’s drawings, whose format recalls identity photographs. A detail that comes back in the exhibition “Beyond the garden, there is the sea” to once again bear witness to this rich belonging.
The contemporary artist works this tone by superimposing thicker and finer textures, leaving room for roughness that echo the complexity and plurality of the identity of the people painted. In search of a truth and not of a perfection, he voluntarily leaves the trace of his artistic process, the painting in the making, as the index that always everything is and that everything happens. Beyond the physical, beyond the tangible, the painting of Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux is that of a wide open thought, that of thought in sharing.
The exhibition “Beyond the garden, there is the sea” is a journey, an exploration as much physical as spiritual, which questions the question of home and the relationship to oneself in the world. The artist represents this duality, rooting and openness, through the motif of Creole gardens (in reference to Patrick Chamoiseau and his work Texaco. 1992). The garden represents an intimate, protected and familiar space, a place of autonomy and collective memory.