Open until February 26, 2022 at the Septieme Gallery, the exhibition of contemporary artist Didier Viodé takes a look at his interiority, charms images and testimonies of his life, his parents, his youth, his convictions and opens his proximity to the discovery beyond his own body.
For the artist, « Regarder le monde » proposes a specific humility that he transmits without entrusting us with the subtleties, since he did not want to interpret, to seize in its strictest flatness, the instantaneousness, the suddenness. He vanishes behind the substantial partitions of his nation of origin, leaving us only a group of signs to glance at the rest, and then, at that moment, at the world.
© photo : Nicolas Brasseur
Spectator and anthropologist of humanity, Didier Viodé is not in fiction, through his travel books, his drawings which become works, statements to depict the human in order to recommend the diffuse.
The artist involves his work around representation in a self-portrait very close to his series of 64 drawings of himself made in spring 2019, through the « Self-Protrait of a Confined One » where he depends on and frees himself from his elements. When he no longer considers reality, he contorts it and transforms himself into the Other, his self-representations become paintings while addressing the one who paints, the one who looks, the one who is painted?
Acrylique sur papier, 2021
Then, at that moment, the mark of insight shifts. We look away while Didier Viodé glances at the distance. For « Les Hommes Debout », his reference line has been modified and improved. The presence is welcome, this « standing man » is skillful, insofar as he sublimates his pride. His body, from start to finish, is a self-image that reactivates itself with so many perspectives as so many ways to check our reality.
He contextualizes himself with a checkerboard floor, a desert populated by a bush, a blue sky or a sky blue ocean. His Standing Men are generally self-representations that look nothing like each other. It is never very him, nor very another. For Didier Viodé, the reason does not make a difference, since he seeks to represent the man, he started essentially from himself.
In his pictorial approach, the woman appears, as a quest of the human incarnation. They are not currently its elements which count, but the pledge of the being.
© photo : Nicolas Brasseur
Since his beginnings, Didier Viodé tries to tend towards a definitive rectitude. Of his painting, it hardly remains that the essential, an attitude, a glance. He shows what we offer in our whole, by underlining this delicacy, by drawing the attention on this weakness, which we cover, without never managing to prevent it completely from escaping.
Didier Viodé flushes out characters from representations of strangers, strips away appearances and keeps only the general. He decontaminates, he pours to paint a sublimated world, a reality where we see only the delicious, a cleaned world, subtracted from the regular while waiting for the magnificence and while leaving the rest aside.
Didier Viodé
Born in the Ivory Coast and originally from Benin, Didier Viodé began his studies at the Institut National Supérieur de l’Art d’Abidjan, then continued them in France while the Ivory Coast was sinking in the political emergency and integrated the École des Beaux-Arts de Besançon. There he discovered the FLUXUS movement which advocates that everything is art, as well as the Support/Surface movement of Claude Viallat.
He then began to involve insignificant materials in his work, for example cardboard, jute cloth, old paper that he glued directly onto his various supports, but also to isolate the work from its support, from the frame and sometimes even from the constraint.
His inspiration comes from the road, its situation, society and the media. He observes man, the stranger, paints, photographs and films his daily existence. By placing man at the center of his preoccupations, his goal is to allow to look at the world through his specialty: art.
