Jérôme Neutres – Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa

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the exhibition, what would become over the years the most
important collection of African contemporary art in the world,
replete with some ten-thousand works today.
As with Roussel, in a sense, Africa is first also for Jean Pigozzi
a land of desires and mythologies, a window into imagining
another possible world, a springboard for poetry. But unlike
the author of Impressions of Africa who wrote his own text
about it, Jean Pigozzi put together another sort of narrative
in the form of a collection of contemporary African works of
art. To Raymond Roussel’s “Impressions” of Africa, today we
offer comparing the “Expressions” of Africa created over these
last thirty years by the artists of the “dark continent” chosen
by Jean Pigozzi, and who have proven over time to be the
best African artists. Works often radically foreign to western
artistic practices; or sometimes created as a function of or in
comparison with western ghosts. The current exhibition was
constructed through a subjective exploration of the Pigozzi
Collection, by looking at these works with the eyes of their
collector, by listening to the history of Jean Pigozzi’s artistic
tastes and desires. We have wanted to offer an original
reading of this collection as a collection. And also to create,
through the reference to Raymond Roussel, a mirror effect
between two eras, two looks, two continents, to show how
much Africa, if it has been a fundamental motivation of
western artistic imagination, was also nourished from African
dreams of Europe. “Cultures are changed by exchanging and
are exchanged by creating,” said poet Édouard Glissant, a
hero of cultural diversity.
What made a person like Jean Pigozzi accumulate tenthousand
works in thirty years? What are the reasons that
drive him to concentrate this exceptional collection on one
territory in the world, Africa, that he explicitly does not visit
and where he will probably never go? How did this innovative
artist of photography who is also this pioneer collector find
himself amidst creations of African art so different from
his personal artistic work? Or is it in fact that Jean Pigozzi
found in these African artists a part of himself, conscious
or unconscious, that he had not been able to express in
his practice of photography? These are the subjects of our
exhibition. We have also had Jean Pigozzi speak about his
artists, their work, their style, his desire for art. The previously
unseen interview published in this catalogue takes a look at
a selection of his remarks about his collection.
There is an Africa, the geographical and sociological
continent of the world that requires several lives to travel
through and understand, like all the world’s great regions
and civilizations. There is also an Africa of contemporary
artists, which is not the same reality, but which comes from
it directly. Subjective looks, poetic images, artistic creations,
which sometimes take root in traditional cultural practices,
and sometimes in thought about the intersections of the
history of African art and the history of western art. There is
finally an Africa of Jean Pigozzi, an artistic reality collected
and nourished in the imagination of these collected works,
that does not seek exhaustivity or an academic panorama,
but that offers a certain vision of an imagined Africa that
becomes in turn a sort of work in-and-of itself.
When we speak of Jean Pigozzi’s collection, we must
mention the driving force of André Magnin, in all likelihood
the best expert of the contemporary African artistic scene,
who was hired by Pigozzi in 1990 as an “art researcher” to
establish what is today the most significant collection
of contemporary African art. If Jean Pigozzi approved the
acquisition of each work, if the mix that comprises the
collection – and which resembles no other – is in the end
Pigozzi’s personal choice, there is also a lot of André Magnin
in this collection – his tastes, his encounters, his loyalties.
It is clear, for example, that Kinshasa and the Congo are
very represented in the collection, and that other countries
– in particular the countries of English-speaking Africa – are
absent. It is another map of Africa that this collection draws,
a geography that corresponds to a history different from the
continent’s history: the history of a collection, the history
of André Magnin’s trips, the history of Jean Pigozzi’s artistic
friendships particularly. Because Jean is a man of emotion,
whose collection – like an address book – bears witness to
his faith in friendship. There are not many artists who he
met and whose works he purchased at the beginning of the
1990s that are not found over and over again today in the
collection’s new developments. Chéri Samba has thus been
present in this collection since its beginnings. We find, in
fact, material with a real retrospective of Samba, a brilliant