Abdoulaye Konaté: Les Plis de l’Âme

La Galerie 38, Casablanca, presents Les Plis de l’Âme, a solo exhibition by the artist Abdoulaye Konaté from Friday 18 June to Thursday 29 July 2021. For his second exhibition at Galerie 38, Abdoulaye Konaté presents a set of 11 monumental and unpublished works, all created during lockdown, especially for this exhibition.

Working with tapestry, clothing, painting and sculpture, he uses fabric as his main creative material and draws his inspiration from African spirituality as well as from world events. He works in strips sewn onto increasingly large surfaces. All of Konaté’s pieces are oriented towards a search for colours, the compositions present some elements of reality for which he finds inspiration in nature, animals, the cosmos but also the way people dress.

The works are made up of thin, flat strips of dyed cotton, in which warm and dry colours are mixed, which he unfolds in moving waves. He thus creates a cosmic space thanks to a subtle work of kinetic vibrations. A whole color pallet can be found in Konaté’s work, forming a chromatic spectrum: “the grey-blue of the Tuaregs, the greens, reds, blues, mauves and purples of Zaïane n°2 (a tribute to this Berber tribe of the Middle Atlas who resisted the French conquest and whose name means “son of the shadow”), the variation of greens in L’hommage à la femme marocaine, the blues and greens of the Tuareg circles, the blacks, browns, reds, oranges, yellows and whites of the Sahel-Sahara triangles, the arkillas kerka (Fulani traditional wedding hangings), the blue greys that form a horizon for a small character, the greys and reds, the polychrome symphony of the butterfly.

The Malian’s work speaks to us through the senses rather than through reason. And this blue that comes back as a leitmotiv, a rhythmic line that constitutes the motif, as in a musical variation around which the artist’s symphony is articulated. A blue that underlines, intensifies, illuminates. It seems that the artist has pronounced a maxim, “silence is golden”. In the toxic world of noise and fury that is contemporary art, the artist has always taken care not to raise his voice too much. It seems that reason belongs to those who understand and try to decipher a meaning, a direction. It is undoubtedly this quest that has led him to become the man he is today” – Simon Njami.

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