François-Xavier Gbré

Living and working between France and Ivory Coast, this mixed-race Ivorian artist, who grew up in the North of France, faces Côte d'Ivoire's change, economic growth, great urban expansion, and above all vestiges. Step by step, François-Xavier Gbré creates a landscape of his own through a collection of photographs, which reveal hidden aspects of everyday life. The past in Gbré's photographs is foreign and unfinished. United by a methodical, often distanced perspective on architecture and landscape as a form of documentary evidence, his work recalls the landmark photography of Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, and Guy Tillim. From Mali to Israel, from Lille to Rabat, he photographs abandoned constructions that bear the traces of the social and political history of their country. François-Xavier Gbré's photographs cast a detached eye on these buildings and the symbolic weight that nations lay upon them. With his series Tracks, started in 2009, he deals with the symbolism of once-valorized objects, now left behind. His images of interior scenes and the surfaces of abandoned buildings constructed during the colonial era or at the moment of independence sustain an examination of aesthetic and sociopolitical forces on architecture. With a soft radicality, he testifies of an interval, of those swinging moments intensely revealed by architecture. With a sensibility that is deeply engaged in recording the state of the world and partaking in it through photography, François-Xavier Gbré's photographs reveal a passing, a track. The unexpected object or detail that brings back history is always present, moreover actual. In the urban confusion, where we sometimes get lost, and throughout his works, the question of our lifestyles, our social interactions and our relation to History, is raised on a local scale, as an echo of universal expression. ...

Galerie Cecile Fakhoury opened its doors in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in September 2012. In May 2018, the gallery inaugurated its second space in Dakar, Senegal and a showroom in Paris, France. Shortly after, in March 2020, a new project space dedicated to emerging artists from Africa opened in Abidjan. In October 2021, Galerie Cecile Fakhoury inaugurated another gallery, opening in the 8th arrondissement of Paris on Avenue Matignon. The gallery promotes contemporary art from Africa and the Diaspora by providing visibility to the artistic diversity and creative spirit from the continent. Through its programming of solo and group exhibitions, participation in international art fairs, biennales, and collaboration with international galleries, Cecile Fakhoury is a leading force putting contemporary African art on the global map. The artists represented by the gallery are distinguished by their cultural identities and stories, they create a new language that crosses geographical boundaries and familiarities. They are observers of the world they live in, critics of society, and committed to their positions living within complex histories. In turn, they ask us to reconsider our own relation to the world. ...