Pascale Marthine Tayou
Sunday, 16 June 2013
Work from his oeuvre.
“Jean Apollinaire Tayou was born in Cameroon. In the middle of the 1990s he changed name, declining it in the feminine form to become Pascal(e) Marthin(e) Tayou. This marked the beginning of an unceasing artistic, geographic and cultural nomadism that has brought Tayou to prominence on the contemporary art scene.
Tayou’s work, like his name, is deliberately fluid and eludes pre-established schemes. Multiple, ungovernable, gripping, profound, unexpected, proliferating and varied, it is always linked to the idea of travel and the encounter with what is other to self. Being a traveller is not just a condition of life for Tayou, but also a psychological condition capable of subverting social relations and the political, economic and symbolic structures of our lives.
Tayou’s work is conceived in situ, in close association with the here and now. Every new exhibition project is viewed by the artist as a celebration of life and as a relational experience with everything, that is, with place, people, culture, history, and the materials and objects that populate that world. ‘A mix between salt and sugar,’ is how the artist defines his shows. ‘This is life. We are happy then sad, and vice versa, and so it goes on. This is harmony: a little light, a little darkness. When I create a show I always try to play with this condition of the human being.’” –Galleria Continua