Jean François Boclé exhibits at Saatchi Gallery

Pangaea II: New art from Africa and Latin America
March 11th 2015 to September 6th 2015
Saatchi Gallery
Londres

Jean-François Boclé
Tout doit disparaître! ©

Pangaea II: New Art From Africa and Latin America features the work of 18 emerging artists who provide an expansive insight into the work being produced against the backdrop of present day complexities in their respective homelands.
Witnesses to the transformation of their societies, the artists working in these two distinctive regions are increasingly based within cities that are changing at an unprecedented rate. Their work employs a hybrid of traditional and contemporary techniques and materials, reflecting on social and political issues faced during this period of rapid urban and economic expansion.
Including sculpture, painting, installation and photography, Pangaea II: New Art From Africa and Latin America explores the diverse cultural influences and thriving creative practices in the two great continents that were once conjoined as the prehistoric landmass of Pangaea.
Pangaea II: New Art From Africa and Latin America features work by Dawit Abebe, Aboudia, Eduardo Berliner, Jean-François Boclé, Armand Boua, Pia Camil, Alida Cervantes, Virginia Chihota, Alexandre da Cunha, Federico Herrero, Diego Mendoza Imbachi, Eddy Ilunga Kamuanga, Jorge Mayet, Ibrahim Mahama, Boris Nzebo, Alejandro Ospina, Ephrem Solomon and Mikhael Subotzky.
The installation “Tout doit disparaître” has been bought by Saatchi Gallery in March 2014
Here are some words from the artist about this installation:
Turn back a use on itself as it is usual to do at supermarket checkouts, a gesture that involves inflating air into a plastic bag held by suspenders to store away commodities purchased.
Fifteen thousand times repeated! Thirty five thousand times repeated! Ninety seven thousand times!
Massive destocking! Everything must go!
*A monument made of this object referring both to exchange and to loss.
Vertigo of the blue which absorbs.
Blue of the sea ever crossed, Black Atlantic where a relieved humanity breathes and addresses us.
Maintain one week, one month, six months in the exhibition space an impossible monument that disappears after each of our looks.
Only drowning will remain.
Jean-François Boclé, 2004-2015

Jean-François Boclé
Tout doit disparaître©

Jean-François Boclé has developed since the late 1990s an artistic approach using a broad range of media: installation, painting, sculpture, intervention in public space, performance, writing, video, photography.
Boclé’s work speaks to us about toxicity. Toxicity of the divisions of the world, from Tenochtitlan, Valladolid, Utrecht, Berlin, Versailles, Yalta to Davos, toxicity of a History and a memory written long ago by the only winners, toxicity of the always Very Holly Marchandise1 relegating in a same movement Man and Nature, or even toxicity of contemporary transits, travels and shipwrecks.
On the other bank of a paradigm that questions from its beginnings, he tells us about the wonderment of the invention of a Us, wonderment of the Relation.
This bipolar vibration, between the ‘decolonial’ Frantz Fanon and of Edouard Glissant in the Poetics of Relation, the one that agitates his immeasurable island1, is heard as the place of the infliction2 (atteinte in French). Infliction as toxic contact and infliction as permeability to another. «Martinique, Caribbean and America, where the Atlantic drowned, are my laboratory. It is the places from where I think. Our History is not so short; it goes beyond the sense of what is measurable: the immeasurableness of five centuries of colonial tragedies and of the trauma of the old frontiers of the world. When I go to Fort-de-France, Cali, Santo Domingo or New York, I am as much immersed in the permanence of certain relationship of power coming from the said Encuentra as in the experience of the Caribbean and American Us. That centuries of brewing of Histories and histories are the gestation of a Us we glimpse in our current planetary tectonic.’1
For Boclé ‘the artist unceasingly tells something else; he is in the there-elsewhere. There-elsewhere, because it goes beyond defined limits, because space itself is out of reach, because trance gives back, separates, brings together and drives apart’1.
« Everything must go! » that wonders about what could be a Black Atlantic Memorial is permeable to Ponte Pascali’s Arte Povera (the bridge consists in thousands of metal sponges for dishwashing) and its vertiginous multiplication of an ordinary product ripped from current consumption, and refers to the central place that took the work of Oiticica for Jean-François Boclé around the poetics of Trance, Trans social, political Trance…

Jean-François Boclé
Tout doit disparaître©

1- Jean-François Boclé
2 – The word of the French language ‘atteinte’ is difficult to translate into English because it covers a polysemy of contradictory senses. Infliction can get closer. In atteinte is there the idea of injury, of attack, of insult, or of outrage, but the verb form Atteindre also means to get flustered or to touch emotionally, and the action of touching’ the heart of someone.

To see more artworks https://aica-sc.net/2015/03/07/tout-doit-disparaitre/