From March 24 to May 14, 2022, the MAGNIN-A gallery pays tribute to two great artists, Seyni Awa Camara and Estevão Mucavele, around an exhibition entitled Les restes du bruit. One is a sculptor, the other is a painter; both depict the presence of a world populated by strange creatures or mineral forms. Although the destiny of the artist from Casamance has never crossed that of the Mozambican painter, it seems that the paths of each were born from a message received in a dream.
The exhibition brings together for the first time major works by these artists from the 1980s to the present day. A dreamlike journey, at the borders of two artistic universes, where Mucavele's chromatic landscapes resonate with Camara's abundance of earth creatures. What remains of the noises that visit us? Is it a silence? Whispers? Life? Step away from the din to welcome the works of Camara and Mucavele. Here, the noise's vestiges reveal the mysterious passage of the spirit or of inspiration in an inhabited silence. Their creations fascinated André Magnin when he met them in their respective countries at the end of the 1980s.
These two artists of the same generation do not speak much. Each in their own way explores the unions of man, woman or animal with nature. Whether through the zoomorphic expressions of sculpture or, in painting, the visual fusions of forest and rock, the works are indeed what remains, what persists, when the noise has gone.
The Western public discovered Seyni Awa Camara's sculptures for the first time in 1989 during the exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre", organized jointly at the Centre Pompidou and the Halle de la Villette in Paris. Since then, her works have travelled around the world and are now conserved in the most important cultural institutions. Her style is unique. Large earth figures, sometimes hieratic, where the faces of children, chameleons or even birds cling to the body everywhere....
As for Mucavele's work, it remains more confidential and few exhibitions have been devoted to him so far. André Magnin met the painter in the 1980s when he was traveling through Africa. He visited Mucavele on every trip to Mozambique. "I have long been interested in his strange, immobile, silent paintings". Les restes du bruit is the first exhibition to be devoted to him in Europe and offers the opportunity to appreciate the work of this extraordinary artist.
