Presentation

After training in graphic arts, Stéphane Carricondo founded in 1990 the collective 9eme Concept with Jerk 45 and Ned.

Stéphane Carricondo when he draws his characters confronts us with the colonial history of yesterday as much as with our painful actuality, always and again made of violence, drama, domination and exile. His work, nourished by anthropological, ethnological and sociological images mixed with the spontaneity of graffiti, echoes strangely the anxieties and wars that are a part of everyday life. One feels embarrassed by the proud and inquisitive looks of his anonymous heroes who question us by pretending to ask, "You will never cease? "

The original documents that give birth to these portraits come from photographic images taken in human zoos during colonial exhibitions. In a pseudo scenic and sadly tropical environment, there was no hesitation in exhibiting, under the pretext of exoticism, men, women and children of non-Western ethnic groups.

In the restitutions of Carricondo, no caricatures or third-world mercies, but rather the putting forward of a double-entry thought, tributary to anti-colonial struggles and a humanist heritage. His faces, which accumulate, overlap and blend together to destabilize us, help to give an enlightening answer to the questions of Aimé Césaire in his famous Discourse on colonialism when he stresses that "a civilization that cunning with its principles is a Moribund civilization "and that" there is the poison instilled in the veins of Europe, and the slow but sure progress of the savagery of the continent. " The inspired artist then materializes with his meticulous features the visions of the poet of Martinique and unmasks by the precision of his line all the falsifications. He awakens minds asleep by his drawing and his strokes of pink, purple, turquoise ... His heads from all over the world remind us that behind the facade of European humanism conceal the duplicity, the double language and the travesty of reality. His unnamed, identityless, undocumented characters ask us, "What is it for us today? "

The violent and masterful graphics vibrate silhouettes of fragility, lines of precariousness, fissures of contemporary lives. Carricondo by giving voice to the landless evokes Edward Said in his remarks on the mixing of cultures that disseminate colonial prose, mental montage, representations and symbolic forms still serving as an infrastructure for all imperialisms.

The artist is interested in memory to exalt responsibility and inheritance and propose in his painting the dream of a new form of critical humanism based above all on sharing what differentiates us. It is the dream of a universal "polis" because Métis! What Senghor called "a rebirth of the World" in his "Prayer to the Masks"

Masks black masks red, you masks white-and-black
Masks at the four points from which the Spirit blows
I greet you in silence! (...)
Face masks without mask,
Stripped of any dimple as of any wrinkle
Who composed this portrait,
This mien face bent over the white paper altar
In your image, listen to me!

Stéphane Carricondo, in his plastic approach, mixes with delicacy and virtuosity the precision of the anatomical drawing and the spontaneous automatism of the gesture, the black and the colors, the void and the full, the body and the spirits. His visions, which combine dreams and reality, offer a sharp reflection on the fractures of human existence when the enemy is not only the colonist, the other, but also the "like, the brother."

Renaud Faroux
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Who is the artist?

After training in graphic arts, Stéphane Carricondo founded in 1990 the collective 9eme Concept with Jerk 45 and Ned.Stéphane Carricondo when he draws his characters confronts us with the colonial history of yesterday as much as with our painful actuality, always and again made of violence, drama, domination and exile. His work, nourished by anthropological, ethnological and sociological images mixed with the spontaneity of graffiti, echoes strangely the anxieties and wars that are a part of everyday life. One feels embarrassed by the proud and inquisitive looks of his anonymous heroes who question us by pretending to ask, "You will never cease? "The original documents that give birth to these portraits come from photographic images taken in human zoos during colonial exhibitions. In a pseudo scenic and sadly tropical environment, there was no hesitation in exhibiting, under the pretext of exoticism, men, women and children of non-Western ethnic groups.In the restitutions of Carricondo, no caricatures or third-world mercies, but rather the putting forward of a double-entry thought, tributary to anti-colonial struggles and a humanist heritage. His faces, which accumulate, overlap and blend together to destabilize us, help to give an enlightening answer to the questions of Aimé Césaire in his famous Discourse on colonialism when he stresses that "a civilization that cunning with its principles is a Moribund civilization "and that" there is the poison instilled in the veins of Europe, and the slow but sure progress of the savagery of the continent. " The inspired artist then materializes with his meticulous features the visions of the poet of Martinique and unmasks by the precision of his line all the falsifications. He awakens minds asleep by his drawing and his strokes of pink, purple, turquoise ... His heads from all over the world remind us that behind the facade of European humanism conceal the duplicity, the double language and the travesty of reality. His unnamed, identityless, undocumented characters ask us, "What is it for us today? "The violent and masterful graphics vibrate silhouettes of fragility, lines of precariousness, fissures of contemporary lives. Carricondo by giving voice to the landless evokes Edward Said in his remarks on the mixing of cultures that disseminate colonial prose, mental montage, representations and symbolic forms still serving as an infrastructure for all imperialisms.The artist is interested in memory to exalt responsibility and inheritance and propose in his painting the dream of a new form of critical humanism based above all on sharing what differentiates us. It is the dream of a universal "polis" because Métis! What Senghor called "a rebirth of the World" in his "Prayer to the Masks"Masks black masks red, you masks white-and-blackMasks at the four points from which the Spirit blowsI greet you in silence! (...)Face masks without mask,Stripped of any dimple as of any wrinkleWho composed this portrait,This mien face bent over the white paper altarIn your image, listen to me!Stéphane Carricondo, in his plastic approach, mixes with delicacy and virtuosity the precision of the anatomical drawing and the spontaneous automatism of the gesture, the black and the colors, the void and the full, the body and the spirits. His visions, which combine dreams and reality, offer a sharp reflection on the fractures of human existence when the enemy is not only the colonist, the other, but also the "like, the brother."Renaud Faroux