INTO THE BLUE – Group Show

Gallery Soview presents INTO THE BLUE, a duo show featuring Burkinabe artists Casimir Bationo and Mouss Black from April 5 to May 31. Location: 13 Mulberry street East Legon.

Casimir Bationo / CasziB is originally from the Lélé Tribe in Center- West Burkina Faso and was born in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) in 1982. He now works and lives in Ouagadougou. After immersing himself in the worlds of painting, drawing, photography, lighting and motion pictures, he then formally attended a 3 years training in contemporary painting, acquiring crucial techniques to perfect his art and unique style. He lived in Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Morocco and Europe.

Discovering CasziB’s universe is often compared to embarking on a haunting adventure made of faces with piercings, seizing eyes that seem to follow you everywhere and dare you to truly listen to their life stories and imagine their fates in a world where the beauty fights the cruel, where the delicate triumphs over the violent.

The core message of his paintings is often referring to difficult and harsh subjects such as the place of mankind in nature, racism, homelessness highlighted by the the grace and the tenderness with which it is represented. CasziB’s art is that powerful because it unsettles, it disturbs, it questions but most importantly because through the discovery of its unique world it prompts a discovery of oneself.⁠

Mouss Black is an artist from Burkina Faso, living and working in Ouagadougou. He doesn’t come from a family tradition of black-smiths or bronze smelters but as teenager was introduced to art at the Fondation Olorun.

Over the years, he has built up a solid reputation for his unique sculptural works, in which he skillfully blends wood and iron, sometimes embellished with canvas and recycled objects. More recently, he has extended his artistic exploration to the field of drawing, where his focus on medium’s diversity is also striking.

In his pictorial artworks, Mouss Black opts for the use of coffee, inspired both by its singular hue and the memories it evokes, recalling moments shared in his native Burkina. Instead of a paintbrush, he uses a teaspoon to create his characters, which are themselves made of coffee. He then uses pens of different colors to accentuate movements and create visual harmony.

For Mouss Black, painting and sculpture are not separate disciplines, but rather complementary approaches that enable him to expressively explore the issues raised by the contemporary world that eludes him and that he seeks to understand. His works reflect this artistic and intellectual quest, a constant search for meaning in an ever-changing world.

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