Yao Metsoko

Franco-Togolese painter-sculptor, Yao Metsoko was born in 1965 and has lived in France for about thirty years. “The artist feeds on the symbols of the traditional culture of his childhood, like the tree which sinks its roots all the more deeply as it wants to extend its branches. The more he returns to the source, the more he discovers its resources and ramifications. This culture of origin never ceases to mutate, to graft itself onto other cultures of encounter, to hybridize, to leave the narrow framework of its identity to re-identify itself, it is a dynamic flow in perpetual recasting. Without a spirit of revenge or claim, he borrows from Western art what it has borrowed from Africa, serenely inscribing itself in the circulation of cultural codes. The artist lives in his culture like a soil and a set of open and inventive possibilities of which he exploits the fruitfulness. He gives an artistic version of it as a set of resources between which we can circulate and question ourselves. »(Hce Galerie).