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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painter, from his first storyboards from the 1970s to his more<br />
simplified large format canvases from the 2000s - 2010s. It<br />
is extremely rare in the history of art collections to meet a<br />
collector who has managed (if the collector has the desire<br />
to do so, because collectors often have changing tastes and<br />
fly from collection to collection according to their desires...)<br />
to follow an artist’s entire career. The case of Samba in the<br />
Pigozzi collection is not unique. We could say the same of<br />
Moke, Lilanga, Hazoumè... The artists from his collection are<br />
for Jean Pigozzi a sort of new family. A family that he chose<br />
for himself. The farthest away from his European-American<br />
culture and his Italian-French roots. Unless, on the contrary,<br />
this new family has revealed to him another part of himself,<br />
like Jean Genet who said in Prisoner of Love that he had<br />
become, out of fascination for <strong>Africa</strong>, a “black man who has<br />
white and pink colors.”<br />
Rousseau. Jean Pigozzi loves the numerous paintings of this<br />
exceptional master even if he has often been refused by<br />
curators (or perhaps because of that?). Our exhibition is proud<br />
to present masterworks by Bodo, works as strong as they are<br />
unique. Not only does this painting deserve to be known and<br />
recognized, but our subject is first and foremost Jean <strong>Pigozzi’s</strong><br />
look onto <strong>Africa</strong> and its artists. Bodo holds a special place<br />
in this geography of <strong>Pigozzi’s</strong> imaginary <strong>Africa</strong>. It is perhaps<br />
not by chance, because this work is based fundamentally<br />
on phantasmagoric visions. Pierre Bodo’s oneiric painting<br />
inevitably seduced Jean Pigozzi, whose collection is based on<br />
an <strong>Africa</strong>n dream.<br />
Even the most daring and audacious of collectors, if<br />
they accept and take ownership of risk taking by investing in<br />
the names of unknown artists, still end up listening a tiny bit<br />
to criticism and the market. You can go for a short time against<br />
the vox populi of the art world, as was the case of the great<br />
pioneer collectors, like Jacques Doucet buying Brancusi when<br />
the critics teased him severely (“Art for Americans!” mocked<br />
critic Louis Vauxcelles), and acquiring Douanier-Rousseau’s<br />
The Snake Charmer which would be refused for years by<br />
national museums when it was donated! But it is rare for a<br />
collector to spend his or her life fighting against the winds<br />
of the institutions and the market. Now, if a good number of<br />
artists from the Pigozzi collection are today (almost) finally<br />
recognized and (almost) celebrated as they should be given<br />
their importance, not only did that take a lot of time, but<br />
moreover certain names, like Lilanga or Bodo, continue to<br />
cause bewilderment or indifference in the west. If in this<br />
case, Pierre Bodo is still exiled from panoramic exhibitions<br />
on <strong>Africa</strong> in renowned museums and art centers, even the<br />
ones presented from the Pigozzi collection, Jean Pigozzi<br />
still maintains his full admiration for him. The painter, now<br />
deceased, developed an eminently original world, a surrealist<br />
poetry that imposes a style that is not found elsewhere. His<br />
fantasy allegories sometimes remind people of Hieronymus<br />
Bosch and his imaginary landscapes have the apparent<br />
naïveté of style that makes people think of Douanier-