BOISSY-LE-CHÂTEL.- GALLERIA CONTINUA is presenting a major exhibition dedicated to Pascale Marthine Tayou, a leading figure in international contemporary art, at its Les Moulins site, located in Boissy-le-Châtel.
Tchâm: Confidences is a monographic exhibition celebrating 25 years of collaboration, trust, and shared experience between the Cameroonian artist — based in Belgium — and the gallery.
The project unfolds across the entirety of the 10,000 m² site, which has hosted large scale works and bold artistic projects from around the world since 2007. Between vital breath and joyful tensions, Tchâm: Confidences invites visitors to reflect on our times, immersing them in the artist’s colorful universe - one in which they become active participants as they move through the space.
Spanning a wide variety of formats, the exhibition brings together over a hundred works from the artist’s early career to his most recent creations. It features materials and mediums that have long defined Tayou’s artistic vocabulary : glass, crystal, pastel- hued chalk - his recurring chromatic palette - plastic bags, and found objects repurposed into formal and conceptual explorations. As the artist often reminds : “ Everything is possible. Making an exhibition is not about the materials, but about what you do with them. It’s about finding a way to tell something new — be it with an umbrella or a branch… ” Several emblematic works will be on view : the famous Poupées Pascale (Pascale’s Dolls), contemporary fetishes from ancestral cultures ; the Colonnes Pascale (Pascale’s Columns), fragile and vibrant totems ; and the Colonial Ghosts, multicolored glass figurines produced in Sunderland, here gathered in one of their largest presentations to date. Monumental installations - a practice in which Tayou excels—punctuate the exhibition path, addressing ecological abuses and contemporary global tensions. Among them : Coton Tige, a cloud-like cluster of cotton and wooden spikes originally created in 2015 for the Serpentine Gallery in London, in a former powder storehouse, evocatively confronting the violence of Europe’s colonial and slave- trading past. Further on, Survival Tree rises like a palaver tree adorned with transparent masks - spirits of ancestors or allegories of our multifaceted identities.
Oxygen, first presented at Collection Lambert in Avignon and later at Chaumont-sur Loire, creates a tension between nature and artifice, as well as between ecological urgency and sensory poetry.
Also featured is David Crossing the Moon, a luminous intersection of a crescent moon, a cross, and a star—offering a striking metaphor for Tayou’s vision : an invitation to transcend religious and cultural divisions in favor of a graphic, critical, and luminous coexistence. Specifically conceived for the exhibition, a newly created series of flags titled L’enfer du décor, produced during a recent extended stay in Cameroon, will be presented to the public for the first time.
A self-taught maker, world traveler, and student of life, Pascale Marthine Tayou is a sculptor of shifting identities. His seemingly carefree creations question the tensions between individual and collective, ancestral memory and contemporary mutations.
Deeply humanist, his work aims to bring people together beyond their differences. Through this exhibition, GALLERIA CONTINUA celebrates a special relationship built on complicity, loyalty, and a shared adventure. It reaffirms the gallery’s commitment to open, critical, and deeply engaged artistic practices. Since its opening in 2007, Les Moulins has become a vibrant site shaped by the seasons, dedicated to monumental creation and cultural diversity—an ideal setting for Tayou’s generous, hybrid, and free-spirited universe.
Charlotte Lidon
Pascale Marthine Tayou was born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon, in 1966. He lives and works in Ghent, Belgium, and Yaoundé, Cameroon. Since the early 1990s and his participation in Documenta 11 (2002) in Kassel and the Venice Biennale (2005 and 2009), Tayou has gained widespread international recognition. His practice is marked by variability, avoiding confinement to any one medium or thematic focus. While his subjects are diverse, they consistently stem from the artist himself. Early in his career, Tayou added an “ e ” to both his first and middle names, giving them feminine endings and playfully distancing himself from patriarchal artistic authority and gendered roles.
The same applies to any attempt to reduce his work to a specific geographical or cultural origin. Tayou’s works are not merely mediators between cultures or explorations of the ambivalent relationship between humans and nature—they are created with the awareness that these are social, cultural, or political constructs. His practice is deliberately mobile, elusive in relation to predefined frameworks, and heterogeneous. It is always closely tied to the idea of travel and encounters with what lies beyond the self, and is so spontaneous it can seem almost nonchalant. The objects, sculptures, installations, drawings, and videos produced by Tayou share a recurring feature: they focus on an individual moving outward into the world.
