2018
ENTENTE
17-23 September 2018
54 The Gallery, Shepherd Market, Mayfair, London
« …C'était exaltant de voir autant d'énergie créative exposée: les murs remplis d'une telle variété d'images, des idées qui jaillissent partout. L'abstraction (entre les mains de quelqu'un comme Mouss avec de nombreuses nouvelles façons d'appréhender la vie) peut créer des surprises d'une manière inattendue qui me fascine. Je suis toujours perplexe que des ‘maîtres' de l'abstraction comme Mondrian ou Ben Nicholson se contentent de s'installer dans une formule (plutôt inerte) et de s'y tenir pour toujours. Le monde n'est-il pas plus intéressant que cela? Il était très clair d'après l'exposition de Mouss qu'il aime la vie et qu'il trouve toujours quelque chose de nouveau à dire, ou de nouvelles sources d'inspiration dans le travail d'un large éventail de maîtres passés - et qu'il ne lui est pas concevable de se limiter à un seul style ou langue d'expression. Et il n'est pas toujours satisfait de la pure abstraction non plus: il y a beaucoup de célébrations du corps humain (féminin, bien sûr), tournées en motifs complexes de toutes sortes. Et en utilisant des tissus, pour réaliser des tentures qui ont une présence chaleureuse rien qu'en vertu de leurs textures et couleurs. « Tentures » oui - j'ai été frappé que peu d'oeuvres aient vraiment besoin de cadres!
Andrew Wilton. Historian d'Art et écrivain. Sept 2018.
Suite à sa visite à l'exposition Entente à 54 The Gallery, Mayfair, London.
Original version in Englsh.
"... It was exhilarating to see so much creative energy on display: the walls packed with such a variety of images, ideas bursting out all over. I'm fascinated by the unexpected ways that abstraction can spring surprises (in the hands of someone like Mouss with plenty of fresh approaches to life) - it's always puzzled me that ‘masters' of abstraction like Mondrian or Ben Nicholson are content to settle into a (rather dry) formula and stick with it for ever. Isn't the world more interesting than that? It was very clear from Mouss's show that he loves life and is always finding something new to say, or something new to find in the work of a wide range of past masters - and is never going to be happy with a single manner or language. And he's not always content with pure abstraction either: there are plenty of celebrations of the human body (female, of course), spun into intricate patterns of all kinds. And using fabrics as well, to make hangings that have a warm presence just by virtue of their textures and colours. ‘Hangings', yes - I was struck by how rather few of the pictures really needed frames!
Andrew Wilton. Author, Art Historian. September 2018.
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Commentaires de visiteurs aux expositions de 2020
Au travers de l'oeuvre de Mouss il est loisible de rencontrer ce qu'écrivait le philosophe « l'art est le plus beau, le plus sublime que nous ait donné le temps et que nous laisse l'éternité »
9.7.20
Un festival de couleurs, un talent exceptionnel, c'est très inspirant, Bravo !
20.7.20
Très éclectique, on sent que l'inspiration du moment est importante, du coeur à la toile sans filtre - Merci!
24.7.20
Beaucoup de ressentis dans tes toiles parsemé d'émotions… 9.7.20
Bravo pour vos oeuvres aux styles variés qui manifestent unéclectisme et une ouverture d'esprit peu commune…
17.7.20
Quelle explosion de vie!..ou quelle densité de reflection!
De toutes les toiles jaillissent le plus intime de l'artiste qui entre en résonance très souvent avec le spectateur, la spectatrice! Tantôt on se laisse porter, on ralentit, on réfléchit, on subit le poids de l'inexprimé… puis à la toile suivante on sourit, on rit, on retrouve la vie sous ses multiples sources…
Bref, une exploration… mieux qu'une exposition, dont on sort réjouie!… Mouss… MERCI!
26.7.20
Merci. Thank you for remembering we all have a story to live through passion, and life and love.
You have a beautiful strong way of expressing this. Honest to the heart.
21.7.20
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March 2020.
MOUSS
“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand” (W.H.Auden)
Writing this essay at a moment of profound uneasiness - March 2020 – when the western world is rapidly approaching paralysis in the face of Nature's guile and omnipotence is to be reminded, yet again, that, as the most contemporary thinking on the quantum universe always so powerfully reminds us, we are part of that nature we seek to understand, bit players in her great scheme, no longer those ultimately controlling and defining it.
It is a position of humility, in truth, that the most thoughtful and sensitive artists of this, or indeed any other age, have always intuitively understood; an English painter I have written about and worked with over the years wrote to me recently of how he “has always carried the conviction that I serve nature or, at least, the great invisible forces”. It is a phrase that echoes powerfully with me again, here and now, encountering for the first time, these exhilarating and richly nuanced works by the Burkina Faso born artist Mouss (Moustapha Maïga), a painted world in which the intense, and very ancient and distinctive visual culture of his Fulani/Peulh/Mossi upbringing meets and fuses with the more self-conscious contemporary striving for personal imaginative and emotional truth in art that has come to characterise 20/21 Century Western culture. Out of this fusion of apparently very different, often clashing, attitudes towards the nature and role of creativity, there is the sense, I feel, that Mouss, in his most recent paintings, is beginning to develop an art which seeks to develop the way we think about and visualise a world we are increasingly realising is in itself in a constant process of self-creation. As the American particle physicist turned philosopher, Karen Barad wrote in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) “Humans are neither cause nor pure effect but part of the world in its open-ended becoming...we know because we are of the world.”
Mouss has arrived at this point the hard way, perhaps the only way, by which I mean that for the first 20-25 years of his artistic career – he is 45 now and started 'making' seriously when he was just 15 – he has had to find his way through, and come to terms with, two powerful and competing cultural traditions. Thus, on the one hand, he had been born into a lineage of traditional textile dyers, an ancestral art form particularly distinctive to the Peulh/Fula culture of Burkina Faso – his grandfather was a master of the technique - while on the other, there has been the colonial influence of France, both in his early education in Burkina Faso and, for the last two decades in France itself, and manifested in the seductive Western/Modernist emphasis on achieving a style based on individual self-expression. The essentially conflicting views of the nature of artistic creativity these two traditions represent is not a new dilemma for artists emerging out of such a colonial environment and there are numerous examples of artists finding themselves caught between one or the other, the artistic outcomes so often feeling largely derivative in character and lacking in dynamic focus.
Mouss's intuitive response to all of this however would seem to have been one of
immersing himself fully within both of these traditions, of coming to terms with their essential methods and characteristics, virtues and shortcomings, and then standing back from both and trying to find how each might then come to enrich the other. He has a nice, almost untranslatably idiomatic, French phrase for this process, seeing himself as an electron libre. Literally 'free electron,' this term, taken from science has, figuratively speaking, come to imply a free or maverick spirit though this does not really convey quite enough of the term's origins in quantum physics where the point of a free electron is not just that it is free but that this freedom gives it the power to provoke a reaction – often quite directly so in a chemical context – that an ordinary electron cannot.
And provoking a reaction is exactly what Mouss is up to in his latest work, searching for those almost alchemical reactions that will transform each tradition and make vivid, new artistic entities.
Looking at work likes Xylophoniste or Femme Peulh for example, with their rich, densely decorative surfaces, it is hard not to see echoes of the astonishingly complex patterning of the dyed fabrics and jewellery worn by Peulh women and, behind that, the fact that Mouss has himself been making dye-works for over 30 years now, endlessly experimenting with dyes and techniques to achieve subtle shadings and nuances alongside bold lines and colours, in ways that are considered distinctly unusual within the Peulh tradition. Significantly too, the complex processes involved in their production, not just the succession of dye baths each colour used requires but, more particularly, the fact that he can never predict just how the colours and materials will interact, all make for a distinctly magical process. His involvement in this tradition has moreover given him an enormous respect for and understanding of the materials involved – all the pigments for them were sourced, dried, prepared, crushed and blended to become dye, the Burkinabe cotton that he uses as the textiles' ground has been grown and harvested, transformed and woven locally. It is all part of an innate feeling he has for matter as a living, transforming thing and it has, over the years, come to run through all his work, painting as well as textiles, and is palpably felt when you physically encounter the works themselves.
The desire to experiment with ancient traditions in this way must surely owe something to his extended encounters with Western/Modernist artistic traditions, first in Burkina Faso and, since 2002, in France itself, at the point when he first started living and working in Montpellier. At the same time there is no question that, as far as his painting has been concerned, these encounters have often proved overwhelming, hard to absorb creatively into a distinctive personal style. Again though his electron libre would seem to have come into play, Mouss finding, within his own Burkinabe culture and upbringing increasingly distinctive ways of transforming these Modernist stylistic formulae into something of genuinely originality.
Part of this has already been hinted at above, in his attitude to his materials as organic, living things in the process of constant transformation that is all part of an altogether more animistic view of nature, but it goes rather further than this again I believe, in the way the very compositional structure of many of the more recent works is infused with memories of his experiences and sensations both of the Burkina Faso landscape as well as its arts and music. Thus, according to his partner, Dido, “one of the things that that inspired his move towards abstract work was the tangled and twisted tree roots he discovered underwater when he went swimming at his favourite waterfalls” and how “when he'd go digging for earth pigments from termite nests he was really inspired by the elaborate architecture they'd created from making their tunnels underground.”
In this same context he also cites the importance of a whole range of cultural influences, from the often powerful geometrical patterns of Bobo masks – often regarded as among the finest of their kind – to the astoundingly rich ensembles of textiles and jewellery worn by the women, but perhaps the most intriguing and influential, particularly in his most recent work has been sound, both natural and musical. Again his is an intensely musical culture – the great Senegalese singers Baaba Maal and Youssou N'Dour are also of Fulani origin for example – and it is thus no coincidence that some of the finest of these recent pieces have musical titles and feature musical instruments – Xylophoniste and Flute. Anyone who has heard and witnessed at first hand this kind of music will recognise immediately the mesmerising intensity of performances in which hugely complex rhythms and instrumentations fuse completely with the ecstatic movement of dance and movement and the most spectacular robes and costumes – in an abstract totality in which players and audience become one unity, momentarily obliterating time and space – in ways very similar to these particularly beautiful paintings.
Natural sounds come into his work also of course; writing to me of the striking abstract painting Untitled he describes it as being about “the movement of birds taking flight and the frroufrrouou noise their wings make”. In fact sound is everywhere you look in Mouss's work, in a way that is rare in Western art – there is the Futurismo of Balla and Boccione of course – but hardly ever encountered in more contemporary work. It gives to them a sense of scale that seems immense when simply seen as a digital image so it comes as a shock to see how he has been achieving this on comparatively modest sized canvases of not much more than 2ft by 3ft! It makes one long to see what Mouss could do on much larger canvases - a rather bigger studio space seems essential for the next phase in his work, poised, as he would seem to be, on the verge of a breakthrough into a whole new stage of his artistic development, an inner world rich with possibilities.
'The inner – what is it? If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the
winds of homecoming.'
'Space reaches out from us and construes the world:
to know a tree, in its true element,
throw inner space around it, from that pure
abundance in you.'
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
Nicholas Usherwood. Curator, art critic and writer on contemporary art and culture.
Suffolk, March 2020.
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