AFRICAN ARTS

It is during one of my first long trips in West Africa that I really noticed this ancestral art, born around the 8th century in this part of the continent, say specialists.

I was quick to get away from the masks made of a light and fragile wood, since it was difficult for me to make the distinction between the real thing and the merchant craft products, very lucrative since the 1930’s.

Fate wanted that I held in my hands this statue made of a very dense, heavy and hard rock. Its beauty was unprecedented and pointed my interest towards similar objects that used to serve rituals and holy ceremonies.

THE MYSTERIOUS KISSI STONE STATUETTES

It is to the French Africanist anthropologist Denise PAULME (1909 – 1998) that we owe one of the most complete studies on these statuettes, of which the Musée de L’Homme has a collection of three hundred and fifty pieces which were discovered in Guinea Conakry on the border of Liberia and Sierra Leone (Kissidougou region), at the time of French colonization at the beginning of the 20th century.

According to some sources, the antiquity of these statuettes could date back to the 13th century. They are made of soapstone, steatite and sometimes sandstone.

Cf: “The Rice People, Kissi, Upper French Guinea” Paris – Denise PAULME – Plon – 1954

I intuitively grouped together a certain number of these statuettes, letting myself be guided only by the wonder and emotion they inspired in me.

Some were photographed on a grid background in centimeters which allows their approximate dimensions to be assessed. I also present other statues in wood, terracotta, and bronze masks, which I find very interesting but which do not evoke in me the same sensations as those generated by stone statuary, which, in my opinion, carries more authenticity.

Alain Charles CHAYER