Abu Bakarr Mansaray, poet of mechanics, exhibited at the City of Science
Abu Bakarr Mansaray: “ALLIEN RESURRECTION [SIC]”, 2004. Graphite pencil and felt-tip pen on paper.
© Collection of African art by Jean Pigozzi.
Photo: Maurice Aeschimann
Text by: Sébastien Jédor Follow
4 min
Artist or engineer?
Both, no doubt!
The Sierra Leonean Abu Bakarr Mansaray is the subject of a first solo exhibition at the Cité des sciences et de l'Industrie, in Paris.
Sculptor, designer, inventor of machines, Mansaray, 62, shows an unbridled and sometimes disturbing imagination, a sequel to the war in Sierra Leone.
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Abu Bakarr Mansaray is a totally self-taught artist. Born in Tongo, a mining town in eastern Sierra Leone, he was passionate about mechanics as a child, to the point of making machines out of wire. It was these strange and very elaborate constructions that the French collector André Magnin discovered in a modest shop in Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital, in 1991. At the time, Magnin was commissioned by the businessman Jean Pigozzi to build a collection of African art. The gallery owner is fascinated by Mansaray's work. And yet, Magnin has seen others: he is at the origin of the discovery, in the West, of Malian photographers Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, among other immense artists!
"We find in Kinshasa (DRC) young sculptors who make robots, but less sophisticated than the work of Mansaray,
assures André Magnin.
I had never seen this anywhere
!
Not of this level or of this aesthetic quality
!
I did not find two artists like Abu Bakarr Mansaray
”.
In the exhibition, a sculpture evoking a radar and another of an unidentified flying object bear witness to this period of inspiration.
Pencil and ballpoint pen
But the discovery of Abu Bakarr Mansaray's work coincides with the start of the war in Sierra Leone.
The killers of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) are quick to illustrate themselves by cutting the arms or hands of their victims with machetes, according to their sinister protocol "short or long sleeve" ... Mansaray can no longer sculpt: go picking up scrap metal or small motors for household appliances in landfills is far too risky.
“
I advised him to draw more,
remembers André Magnin.
I had seen his little notebooks with the diagrams of his machines.
I told him,
"
Draw all that stuff you have in your head! Even the craziest!"
And that gives the works that are around us
".
Abu Bakarr Mansaray: “DIGITAL-MAN”, 2004. Ballpoint pen and graphite pencil on paper.
© Collection of African art by Jean Pigozzi.
Photo: Maurice Aeschimann
A “digital man”, a “nuclear phone”, a “witch plane”… These are some of Abu Bakarr Mansaray's inventions visible at the City of Science and Industry.
Large format paintings made in pencil, colored pencil and ballpoint pen, filled with more or less esoteric annotations and calculations ... Inventions abounding gears, printed circuits, pulleys, pistons, a few weapons war and bloody circular saws ...
Humanist and tormented
The artist's relationship to machines is
“
ambiguous
”
, underlines Gaël Charbau, the artistic curator of the exhibition.
“
Abu Bakarr Mansaray's worldview is generous, humanistic, but he also fights against demons. The civil war marked him and it is sometimes felt. Other paintings, on the other hand, bear witness to a totally unbridled imagination which is nothing other than the mechanical poetry of an engineer-poet
”,
analyzes Gaël Charbau.
After fifteen years of exile in the Netherlands, between 1998 and 2013, Abu Bakarr Mansaray returned to Sierra Leone, from where he hardly ever answers the phone: a nightmare for journalists, who threw in the towel.
Today, the artist produces only a few drawings, making the money from the sale of his previous works grow.
Works that have integrated the largest private collections, but also the MoMA, the prestigious museum of modern art in New York, where one of his drawings is exhibited.
►
Abu Bakarr Mansaray
, at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, in Paris, until February 20, 2022.
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