Paris (AFP)

He donated a museum to Benin and spends his days surrounded by 800 statuettes from the Congo in his office in the Latin Quarter: at the age of 83, the art dealer Robert Vallois lives his passions as a series of happy coincidences.

With a collective of friendly merchants, he set up the "small museum of the Récade" (named after the scepters of the kingdom of Abomey), within an art center near Cotonou.

They donated the money for its construction and donated the Royal Recades that it now houses.

The museum has been open for five years and receives 500 visitors per month.

Robert Vallois and his friends had bought, in particular at public sales, these scepters which had belonged to the kings of Abomey.

"It is a completely impromptu, unorganized initiative, which started like that", he says, amused, stressing his very good relations with his Beninese interlocutors.

"We gave this little museum, we furnished it. We never spoke of restitution. It's in line with the thinking (of) now but we didn't even know at the time. 'didn't approach it like that ".

"We did it with the heart, not the head. We fell into the Beninese bath, the bath of an artists' country. It didn't cost anyone, except us," he said. pulling a huge Havana cigar.

Collector's work, insists this merchant reluctant to ideological debates, "belongs to everyone. It does not belong to a people, not to a State, it is universal. Is it really important to say: + it is mine +? Are there any desires for revenge by saying + it has been looted +? The important thing is that it be done, shown and seen by the greatest number . "

- "My gallery allows me my fantasies" -

The contrast is striking on rue de Seine between its very chic Art Deco gallery on the ground floor and its cluttered office, at the top of a small staircase that creaks: "My gallery, he explains, allows me to fantasies ".

The income he derives from it "allowed him to do what (he) did in Benin", says the man who arrived in Paris in the Halles district in 1972, before joining the left bank in 1981.

Art Deco is his second passion.

"In the 1970s, we were a dozen enthusiasts who reinvented an art of the 1915/20 years passed into oblivion".

"Bob" Vallois, as he is called in the neighborhood, contemplates the 800 objects from the Congo that surround him, with, above them, about thirty Eskimo objects.

"It is not a collection, it is a simple collection" of works with prices ranging from 200 to 20,000 euros, he says.

But "these works, we must not touch them, it is the life of the spirit. It is mysterious, heavy, there is history behind each one".

These statuettes are of the Lega people, "a very secret people, opposed to any central and colonial power" in the troubled east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"I bought everything in Paris".

African art, he observes, is "like a religion, the art of the essential. Look at those faces! With three strokes in the ivory, we transmit joy, sadness, love. , sex, in an essential and natural way! ".

His vocation as a collector?

"It came with Abbé Pierre in the 1950s. I was a boy scout in Monaco, we emptied an apartment to donate the objects".

His son, contemporary art gallery owner Georges-Philippe Vallois, owns two galleries in the same street.

"But he is a painting dealer, I am a second-hand dealer!"

Does he feel bitterness when "the profession of antique dealer which awaited the customer in his shop" is done more and more on the Internet "at a thousand miles an hour": "When I get a little older, maybe that will come! "

© 2020 AFP