Jérôme Neutres – Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa

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Introduction to the exhibition
by Jérôme Neutres
In 1909, 110 years ago, Raymond Roussel published
Impressions of Africa, a masterpiece of literature that
inspired the artistic avant-gardes, from Francis Picabia to
Marcel Duchamp via Apollinaire and the surrealist group.
Roussel had never traveled to Africa and just followed “the
slope of his own imagination” as André Breton said of him.
Roussel’s Africa is an “internal Africa” to use anthropologist
Jean-Pierre Dozon’s expression, a mythical Africa functioning
as a symbolic field, almost the synonym of a utopia. By
placing the horizon of modernity and esthetic innovation
under the sign of an imagined Africa, Impressions of Africa is
a prescient dram if we assess how many original and powerful
contemporary images Africa contains. These are here some
Expressions of Africa that we are presenting, the Africa seen
and displayed by some of the greatest contemporary African
artists. This exhibition is a subject reading of the collection of
Jean Pigozzi, who has been assembling for thirty years some
ten-thousand contemporary works from the African continent
– without having ever gone there himself either. A collector
both through passion and accumulation, Jean Pigozzi has
established the personal narrative of another imagined Africa
based on his artistic imagination. Discovering contemporary
African art in 1989 during the Magiciens de la Terre
exhibition, this photographer-artist was fascinated by the
strength of visual innovation and the new vision of the world
that these works convey. He then started with curator André
Magnin what would become the most significant collection
of contemporary African art in the world. We suggest looking
at these works of art with the eyes of their collector, by
listening to the history of the tastes and artistic desires
of Jean Pigozzi. A reading of the collection as a collection,
that brings together here his twelve favorite painters and
sculptors, the ones whose progress Jean Pigozzi followed
most closely for three decades and who may perhaps make
up his real family.