The concept of “human with a capital H” is one that transcends racial, geographic and socio-political stereotypes.
Born in 1979 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, lives and works in Marrakech, Marocco
A Dream that Doesn't Cease
With over 40,000 followers on Instagram, only 75 posts, some of which have garnered 5,000 likes; he also has a YouTube channel where videos of his exhibitions, graffiti painting, an advertisement for beer featuring him wearing one of his designed blazers – which he creates himself with his personal iconography – can be seen. Some of his privileged collectors already possess these blazers. He can also be observed dancing with spectacular grace and rhythm. It's clear that he is one of the young artists of the moment. This is Mederic Turay (Ivory Coast, 1979), who in 1999 was named the Best Young Artist of West Africa. His passion for art began as a child; by the age of 4, he was already drawing, imitating characters from cartoons and works by Picasso, Dalí, and Basquiat. He grew up immersed in North American urban culture, as his father, a military man by profession, accepted a mission in Washington in 1984. Mederic experienced the golden era of hip-hop during his time in America, embracing dance as bodily expression, rapping, and graffiti art, all part of a cultural explosion that significantly influenced the natural evolution of his work. In 1995, his family returned to Ivory Coast, and Mederic began his studies in Fine Arts, where he found the roots of his culture, which have been manifesting through his art. These two worlds, integral to his life experience, harmoniously coexist in his work. He's convinced that life transformed him into an artist because he believes that art remains the ultimate expression of life. One of his mottos is: "Get inspired to pursue your dreams; then nothing can stop you." He's represented in significant collections such as Charles Saatchi's, King Mohamed VI of Morocco's, and Switzerland's Niarchos Collection.
At first glance, his paintings are attractive due to their exuberant colors that captivate the gaze. This gaze cannot be stopped because, beyond the color, it's ensnared by a labyrinthine "horror vacui" that compels one to traverse the entire canvas. This could be likened to a metaphor for a quantum universe where everything is connected – in other words, a metaphor for reality, a reality that we don't always see. His paintings resemble treasure maps with much to uncover. He states that he paints the noise that surrounds him and creates his own inner landscape. When he paints, he's guided by a need to occupy the entire canvas without pause. I believe this "guided feeling" corresponds to an inner force, the creative impulse that Carl Gustav Jung spoke of when he discovered the "autonomous complex," defined as a split-off portion of the psyche that leads its own life outside the hierarchy of consciousness. Hence, the creative process has a conscious aspect, intention, and an unconscious aspect. With this urge to paint incessantly, Mederic creates a territory that connects his myriad experiences, both personal and collective: diverse cultures, urban art, and primitive art. His influences as an artist, past and present, life and death, all are interwoven, showcasing opposites as inseparable parts of unity, much like in reality and the universe.
Mederic plays with the distortion of form, with the relationship between figure and background, with the gradient of size to suggest depth without resorting to perspective, with the impact of color and with collage, through which he introduces the stability of the concrete into an abstract scenario. All his characters appear crowned; for Mederic, who confesses to having a strong belief in the presence of crowns around a living being, whether human or animal, interprets it as the manifestation of what we radiate onto others, onto the world, something he would describe as the aura, a concept that introduces us to the world of the spiritual. Collages of sculptures from African primal arts coexist with his abstract human and animal representations; they are smaller in size, as if they are further away in space and time, but in reality, they represent the past in the present because neither time nor its course is linear. Formally, these collages for Mederic are a way to play with the interplay of positive and negative space, with realism and abstraction, and conceptually, they are a way to create a connection between spirits and humans, linking the invisible with the visible. This aspiration to ascend to the world of the invisible explains the significant presence of masks in his paintings, as in African religious rituals, masks serve to represent the supernatural.
The characters that occupy his canvases, radiating with their aura and vibration throughout their surroundings, have different and powerful gazes, serving as an example of nonverbal language; eyes with X-shaped crosses, dots, iridescent circles, coffee grains, swirls of light, as expressions of different messages. They look at the viewer and in all directions. Through his characters, Mederic aims to evoke life and death simultaneously, as he believes that it's the intensity of self-awareness, the definitive nature of self-discovery that prepares and makes possible the "timelessness" of death. He holds a poetic view of life and death: "Small deaths fragment throughout our lives. The same abyss widens, the same vertigo shudders at the evocation of each one. The self and death are twin mirrors. The veil withdrawn, they recognize each other in a sort of incestuous embrace. The resulting destruction is not necessarily just physical death; it's also mental death, hallucination, and madness, an image of spiritual death." It's like contemplating death on this earth as a passage to another plane with an awakening of consciousness; thus, Mederic's art creates an arc that could stretch from the sun disks of African cave paintings to more metaphysical, philosophical, and spiritual matters.
His artwork is endowed with an interesting conceptual and philosophical depth about the invisible world; that realm which, even though it's there, isn't easily perceptible. Hence, he turns to primitive art as the earliest representation of humans and animals in their authenticity, from the time of cave dwellers. These totemic presences - the ones he applies through collage - function here as a revisitation of traditional African religions with their totems, magical and powerful entities capable of creating bonds between animals or plants and groups or individuals within a clan. Mederic doesn't fail to see the two faces of the same reality, and these totemic presences in his paintings are like part of the witnesses of time, recounting history alongside him; they represent the primitive spirit, a memory of his ancestors, of traditions. His works are inspired by African fables or poetry, bringing the sacred into his contemporary creation.
His work is rich in meaning as it attempts to address the complexity of humanity through our evolutionary and cultural history. Therefore, his paintings are populated with numerous human references, with characters carrying within them their personal stories, such as joy, sadness, or love - common emotions and feelings experienced differently in a world we are still trying to comprehend fully.
Alongside the contemporary spirit of his art, Mederic keeps "Alkebulan" in mind, the name by which his ancestors referred to Africa, which means "Garden of Eden" or "Mother of Humanity". He acknowledges that Alkebulan, as a search for the origin of humanity, remains an eternal source of inspiration for him as an artist. Years ago, I studied the remarkable cave paintings of Tassili in the Sahara Desert. It's still a mystery which civilization could have painted them some 10,000 years ago - or 12,000, according to some sources. Enigmatic human representations, boats, hippos, rhinos - animals that need a lot of water to live; the resemblance is so striking that it's believed they couldn't have painted them like that unless they could see them there. Africa was then a green paradise, with abundant rivers and lakes, akin to the concept we have of the Garden of Eden. I asked Mederic if he's familiar with Tassili; he hasn't seen them in person either, but he has visited rock paintings in Morocco, those of Oukaïmeden in Marrakech during his massive installations in the mountains, which he recalls as a very pleasant experience and highly inspiring for his work.
Taking a retrospective view, I connect with the philosophy of historical Romanticism and its awareness of the human sentiment of fragmentation, which led them to seek the reconciliation of opposites. This longing became one of the pillars of André Breton's Surrealism, marked by a tireless and profound exploration of the inner world. It was Carl Gustav Jung who resolved this conflict through the collective unconscious, also connecting it with quantum physics. Therefore, I would dare to draw a bridge between Mederic's labyrinthine maps, where one can perceive a connection with the collective unconscious through these totemic figures and African fables, all the way to historical Romanticism, bridging the gap step by step.
At Mederic's request, I conclude the text with a quote from a great African writer, a defender of oral tradition known as the "sage of Africa", Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991): "In Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns."
