Living Together
Solo Show by Salifou Lindou

A multimedia exhibition, Living Together combines painting, engraving, installation and drawing to address a current theme. In these troubled times, full of economic, social and political crises, it is a powerful signal that living together is not entirely self-evident. Lindou's new proposal draws on the register of classical African art and the work of artists whose work he admires: Ousmane Sow, Pablo Picasso and Jean Michel Basquiat. It features a forest of portraits and bodies with gnarled muscles that also wink at the skinning of anatomical boards in Leonardo da Vinci. Opening on familiar situations, it tells about family life, moments shared with friends, and sentimental relationships. Because they are always to be counted with, there is no shortage of devils sowers of mischief in this vibrant fresco of conviviality between ordinary people.

Charged by the various elements that constitute it, the installation is nevertheless central to the overall system. The one with the two cross-shaped scales standing against a painting on the wall, three stained sticks, statuettes and on the ground these red roses, it does not take more than that to represent a kind of altar and immediately transport us to a spiritual dimension. Another one opens a window on the field of intimacy.  A triptych of a series of roses in pink shades is hung on the wall. A kind of "Eden", offering a breathing space with pure lines, soft shapes and pastel colours, expresses how much tamed pain becomes a source of inspiration and a springboard to the peaks of being. Ode to softness and lightness. Ode to stainless love that death does not break and that is illustrated by this floral profusion, all these scarlet roses among the scenes and portraits assembled. How fragile life is, O Aïcha,...