Amadou Sanogo: The manuscripts, Galerie Flach, Stockholm, Suède, Jusqu’au 11.11.2017
Sans Tete, 2016.
About:
Amadou Sanogo was born in Segou, Mali, in 1977. He studied at the Institut National des Arts Plastiques in Bamako. During that time, the director, Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté, quickly noticed him.
After graduating (2003), he experimented with various mediums before concentrating on painting. He mainly uses textiles as background, sourced from his environment, often working through paint with his fingers, as if working the soil.
Sans tete, 2016.
Amadou Sanogo is in a perpetual quest for identity as a human being, Malian, African, as well as an artist. How does one exist, as an artist in a country where the value of art is questioned whilst a primal need for food is not fulfilled? To this question, the artist answers cleverly: ‘All food does not have to go through the mouth’.
This positioning in a country in difficulty marks his political, economic and social involvement, and can be seen in his work as well as the projects he associates himself with.
Untitled, 2016.
Amadou Sanogo talks about himself whilst using universal questions and a universal language.
What are the relationships of human beings with themselves and among each others? His work brings the viewers to question themselves with the same subjects.
The environment he creates favours introspection without imposing answers. To this aim, he supports an identity outside the predefined codes and boundaries attributed to African artists. Defining a new reality, liberated from a certain European ethnographic tradition, his aim is to evolve outside preconceived ideas. In this, Amadou Sanogo places himself outside of any physical or metaphorical frame.
Smile a Bit.
The artist elaborates his own visual and material language, influenced by different aspects of the surrounding culture, as the Bamara proverbs, in leaving those sometimes headless characters playing with their bodies.
In opposition to these figures, headless puppets devoid of spirit and thought, the viewer is invited to search for solutions for today’s absence of future vision, as imposed by international leaders.
He invites those who pronounce these ‘truths’ without background and no context to find themselves in art. As he explains: ‘art cannot exist without questioning and research!’ Art then becomes a mean of identification in a world subject to perpetual change.
Le Bain, 2015.
Amadou Sanogo is in constant search for his own painting technique through the development of simplified almost naive forms that produce a childlike caricatural effect. We are witness to a kind of figurative painting at the limit with abstraction. The figures are reduced to ‘forms’ not losing their meaning. Underlined by vast colour fields, the artist drives the viewer back to the essential. He uses colours that impose themselves in a process of creation and destruction, creating an opening with the colour fields: in this manner, codes are transformed to build a ‘reinvented imaginary of tradition’, with a present capable of forming the past, through moving away from standards and creating a symbolic subjectivity. (text Magnin-A, Paris)