PARIS.- The next sale of Contemporary African Art at PIASA, the leading auction house in Paris, on April 20th will focus on the theme of ‘African Faces’ spanning a wide range of mediums from paper, painting and photography.

This will be Piasa’s third ‘Origins and Trajectories’ auction, dedicated to Contemporary art from Africa and the Diaspora and is part of the huge and growing interest in this relatively new and hottest part of the art market.

Piasa has played a central role in the breakthrough of Contemporary African Art into the mainstream, a process that is still currently gaining interest and energy.

Christophe Person of Piasa, says: “In this auction are works that show both the creativity orf artists in Africa but also reflects the struggling of parts of Africa which is the driving force behind the thousands of immigrants, including talented artists seeking a better life in Europe. There is a strange irony that while this human wave of new immigrants arrives to increasing disquiet in Europe, the young art of Africa is finding wall space among collectors.”

The artists featured in this sale are on the global stage. They include Yinka Shonibare, Vitshois Bondo, Armand Boua, Aboudia, Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh, Soly Cissé, Leslie Amine and Younes Baba Ali, Yassine Balbzioui. Piasa is selling their work as Paris is the centre for what is possibly the hottest growing field in the art market: Contemporary African Art and Photography.

This is no great surprise considering the leading tradition in Tribal Art sales that Paris has enjoyed for many years. Some of these artists have already broken into mainstream collecting which means that instead of being Contemporary African artists, they are actually mainstream Contemporary artists whose theme happens to be the African condition. Armand Boua, for instance, has had solo exhibitions all over the world, including The Saatchi Gallery in London, which also displays works by Aboudia. Soly Cisse had a major solo show “Monde perdu” in the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2005, while Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh have been major names on the US and European circuit for years.

The auction will present two works on canvas by Vitshois Bondo, from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Vitshois is part of the ‘librism’ movement of young artists from DRC and Africa opposed to colonial and old school academic art. Instead his work questions the cultural encounter of humans as well as dialogues between people from different parts of the world. His characters are made by the compilation of cuts from fashion magazines from around the world, taken in countries he has been travelling to. The bodies, mutilated and chaotic, reflect the current political and socio-economic trends in Africa and worldwide.

The auction will also present two works by Ivory Coast artist, Armand Boua, depicting the formless figures of forgotten children of the streets of Abidjan. His inspiration is drawn from street scenes where children can be victims of exploitation for sex trafficking, illegal adoption and plantation labour. The street based artist gives shape to that reality using flattened cardboard boxes, overlaid with acrylic and tar, before tearing, scratching and marking the surface as if to erase the memory of the event. The harshness of the endless wars in the Ivory Coast are at the centre of the works of Armand Boua. PIASA will be offering two of his works made of acrylic and tar on cardboard depicting the everyday life of the youngsters of Abidjan.

The auction will present two works on canvas and two works on paper by Aboudia. Aboudia who lives and works in Abidjan and New York City has been acclaimed by the public and by collectors for his representation of the Abidjan crisis. Aboudia says that the riots that followed the disputed Ivorian presidential election in late 2010 greatly influenced his painting. While some artists chose to flee the civil war, Aboudia decided to stay and continue working despite the danger. He worked in an artist’s studio right next to the Golf Hotel, Ouattara’s headquarters during the post-electoral crisis. He could hear the bullets zipping through the air while he painted. When the shooting got too heavy, he hid in the cellar and tried to imagine what was going on.

As soon as things calmed down he would go back upstairs and paint everything he had in mind. Whenever he was able to go outside, he would paint everything he saw as soon as he returned. Some of his paintings were also inspired from footage he saw on the news or the Internet.

The auction will present a collaborative drawing by Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh. Both artist have been working together, passing drawings back and forth until each of them was satisfied with the outcome made of a dialogue of contrasts and associations. Farkhondeh’s interest is in nature’s intrinsic repetitiveness and Amer’s fascination with the latent eroticism of the human form result in a work that is altogether innocent and goes back to the origins of the earth.

Soly Cissé is a major artist who, in his collages and the paintings depicts characters tortured by doubt. These works are a reflection of recent events in his life. These hybrid beings, animals, spirits, pictograms, graffiti, Senufo silhouettes, emerge as forms caught in movement and colour. Unfinished creatures, children and animals, all are captured frontally, their faces half-sketched.

Kit mains-libres (hands-free kit) by Younes Baba Ali is a series of portraits of Moroccan women incorporating their mobile phones between the ear and the scarf. A gesture both common and ingenious in which religion, fashion, functions and need meet. It questions the role of the scarf, that is very much discussed at the moment, supposedly made to protect women from the exterior world and that is in that case used to ease access to it.

The fantasy world at the time of new technologies when everything seems to be accessible is also at the centre of the work by Leslie Amine. It mixes an exotic environment of palm trees with iconic modern art history and reclining nudes.

Yassine Balbzioui’s universe seems to be an immersion into a disturbing and strange atmosphere. In his work, his figures always share the same lack of human faces, hidden either under a plastic bag, a cloth or in animal disguise. In the animal faces, he successfully manages to catch their essence, instilling at the same time something human. In the family portrait, the masks made of cloth represent the façades we build, often tending to the grotesque.

Mohamed Melehi belongs to the Hard Edge movement: in 1963 he was exhibited at New York’s MoMA and in 1964 at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in “The Formalists”.

He was the only artist in the Arabian world to participate in the exhibition « Bonjour Monsieur Matisse » at the MAMAC museum in Nice which paid tribute to the master of the fauvism movement – Mohamed Melehi was exhibited alongside Andy Warhol, Basquiat and Niki de Saint Phalle.

Recently, the exhibition on Moroccan contemporary art at the Institut du Monde Arabe showcased the work of Melehi who was presented as a Modern Art pioneer with Farid Belkahia. Melehi’s work is instantly identifiable: shape is clearly defined by colors and contours, which is typical of New York’s Hard Edge movement back in the 60s. There are no splashes or scratches, Melehi’s works are figurative and retain Islamic and African themes.