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