The eyelids are lowered but the eye is not completely closed. This is thus not about a dream. But what can one see
well under these conditions? They say they look beyond, this world that we cannot see normally but which the mask
can contact. The people of Africa imagined the dances of the masks to try to regulate problems which emerged to
the alive ones because of the dissatisfaction of the spirits. The dancer is thus inhabited by the spirit that the
mask represents, and he translates it in its dance. The masks themselves are secondary even if we are struck by
their plastic quality and the extreme diversity of the forms, even in the same ethnic group. However similar
plastic solutions are rather largely found. Thus the half-closed eye is a feature that we can find in many corpus.
The previous exhibition of the gallery L'Oeil et la Main presented a whole of masks portraits of the Cameroon and
there the eyes were wide opened. The fact to show the personnality of a character, not a state of intercession,
justifies the use of realism if this is that of the caricature. Quite to the contrary, in the present exhibition
we've selected various masks where the treatment of the eyes - any round or half-closed - returns naturally in the
world of the spirits. Here a Pende epileptic mask with the hallucinated glance, there a terrifying We mask or one
of these large Songye masks with the protuberant eyes intended to impress the initiates. One will easily find some
links between the Punu masks, the Kwele ones, the Songye female type and even Baoule or Gouro because they are
inhabited by the same balance and serenity. Maybe they be very rare or on the contrary quite traditional, all in
common have a great beauty which often always surprises us by the simplicity of the aesthetic choices.
african art / art africain / primitive art / art primitif / arts
premiers / art gallery / art tribal / tribal art / Afrique / Africa /
l'oeil et la main / galerie d'art premier / achat / vente / expertise /
expert / exposition / exhibition / collection / collectionneur / Paris
/ oeuvre / Verneuil / antiquités / antiquaire / musée / museum / masque
/ mask / statue / sculpture / Agalom / Armand Auxiètre /
www.african-paris.com / www.agalom.com
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