Patrimoine Géo-métré
From 7.06.2024 to 26.09.2024
Nashira Gallery hosts “Patrimoine Géo-métré”, Ako Atikossie‘s solo exhibition, which can be visited from June 7th to September 26th, 2024.
The artist, originally from Togo, currently lives and works between Milan and Lomé.
Atikossie’s almost visceral connection to his birthplace shines through in every artwork on show. This bond can, in fact, appear already very clear by looking at the etymology of the title: Patrimoine Géo-métré, a phrase that combines the words geo (land) and mettre (to trace).
Approaching the world as a universal common good, Ako “traces” signs that are incredibly small, by comparison, on his wide-ranging, enormous canvases.
These strokes are the foundation of every piece of art that Atikossie does.
They are rooted in the profound value that the minus sign -so basic, yet so deeply meaningful- represents in his culture’s cosmology, in which it is perceived as a channel of truth in rituals about the past, present and future. The stretch’s multifunctionality, its capacity to convey several, even drastically different meanings (such as an electron or a subtraction) and its distinctive multidirectionality make it an essential component.
The artist, therefore, primarily employs it to paint vivid representations of various locations of his native country.
The latter is captured in the artist’s unique multicolored works, made specifically for Nashira’s exhibition. The land is pictured by highlighting different shades of it and with an emphasis on various geographical phenomena that are strictly peculiar to Africa: from the continent’s stratifications to its strategic locations, like vast deserts, active volcanoes, or aquifer springs. The show also aims to condemn the centuries-long predation that this country has suffered precisely because of the presence of such important resources. In fact, as the work L’occhio sul Sahel describes, Western peoples have always watched and continue to observe them with the greedy eye of the powerful.
Patrimoine Géo-métré thus reveals the face of an ancient but still underrepresented territory, which Ako Atikossie translates into art with characteristic undefined shapes and a steady, deliberate lack of firm points of reference. A sense of dynamism and transformation that is proper to nature and that humans can only grasp as a form of intuition.
Patrimoine Géo-métré, installation view, 2024, photo: m3studio
