His workshop is a journey in itself. After an exhibition at the Espace Pombi in Dakar, Vieux Niang returned to Alsace with his head full of new perspectives. Because his works are anything but fixed. “I thought it was over,” he said of a diptych with “talkative, deafening silence.” Bonnard or Turner did that too. “Bonnard saw again a painting that he had sold, exhibited in a private home several years later. And he added a touch of yellow! »
The artist explores the interior of souls
They are thus “like a river, it circulates, it moves, it is always in motion, we never bathe twice in the same river, said Heraclitus”. This is good because Vieux Niang also had his blue period. He therefore presents a “blue series” which aims to be a work “on reminiscences, memories. I was born on the banks of a river. A river is the cries of children, the comings and goings of traders, interactions between people, there is a whole life around it.”
As always with the artist, his paintings mix colors, gestures and materials. Often fabrics that were once worn and that also drain their stories, or hangings with intense chromatisms. Even the anti-Covid masks that he “did not like at all” to put on.
We read in his works some ideas that appear in filigree, subtly suggested, knowingly or not. A stork, “normal, we are in Alsace”, a stone house. The small formats distill the progress of the little by little. “These are reflections on things that are slowly being put in place, such as for example with regard to violence against women. This question is not yet resolved”, deplores the one who tends to “weaken the executioners”.
As if in weightlessness, Vieux Niang explores, with its colors which are undeniably those of Africa, the interior of souls. A journey that he shares in his lair, over two weekends.
Catch up session , Saturday June 29 from 3:30 p.m. (opening) to 7 p.m., Sunday June 30 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday July 6 and Sunday July 7 from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Vieux Niang workshop, 2 rue de Berne in Horbourg-Wihr. FREE ENTRANCE.
