Elolo Bosoka: Common Forms

Common Forms marks the debut collaboration between Ghanaian artist Elolo Bosoka and AFIKARIS, and his first solo exhibition in France. Curated by Robin Riskin, the show follows a three-month residency in Paris with the gallery, where Bosoka developed a new body of work exploring form, movement, and social systems. Bringing together paintings, drawings, collages, painterly objects, the exhibition blurs the lines between realism and abstraction, modernity and contemporaneity.

Common Forms presents art that probes the space between realism and abstraction, modernism and the masses. The collection of richly hued paintings, drawings, collages, painterly objects, and GPS- data compositions infuse the ingenuity of West African production systems with a century of Western art thought and practice. Swathes of lemon-green, gestures of magenta, scrapes of cerulean blue, and brushes of cloud-grey run from canvases to walls to floors, drawing connections between the individuated art object and the space that contains it. Bosoka brings his hybrid experience as an artist and exhibition producer to his work for Common Forms, using the project as an opportunity to explore system-building on the picture plane, in the process, and in the space at large.

The idea of Common Forms refers both to forms and objects of the commons, and to top-down systems of social control. Bosoka’s compositions hold together the rough and smooth, the everyday and the cubed, the gleaming and the grassroots. Pieces are inspired by and made from the actual residues of signs and strokes that structure everyday life: walls, windows, roads, receipts, maps and vehicles. Bosoka is drawn to figures that we constantly interact with yet often fail to see, and how we could register the life that runs through all beings. He says: It’s important for me to think about objects that are common, and situations that are common to us. It’s important to listen to the situation or condition of an object.

For AFIKARIS, Bosoka’s wanderings through Accra, Kumasi, the Volta, and surrounding regions in West Africa adapt to the metro lines, boulevards and trains of Haussmann’s Paris. As he moves from one place to another, he finds colours, tones and temporalities changing, yet relations to system-building prevailing. In Bosoka’s words: These works show the states I’m in, the places I have been to, or the places I am currently. They are not end results; they are like stages. Because lines move. You know that you are moving to another location soon.

afikaris.com