Frédéric Bruly Bouabré : Colui che non dimentica

Who is Bouabré? Writer, artist, storyteller, philosopher, sage, mystic, inventor, researcher, pacifist, teacher, poet, communicator, prophet, scholar, researcher, visionary, observer, documentarian and archivist of the world around him. Born on March 11, 1921, in Zépréguhé, Côte d'Ivoire, on a day in 1948 he received a heavenly revelation and began to create "pictogrammes" that in his 449 symbols went on to form a new alphabet: the Bété.

In 1970, Bouabré begins to make thousands of "cartes postales" on which he draws with ballpoint pen and colored crayons and around which runs a text. And it is writing "a remedy that fights oblivion" that Bouabré uses to tell us a story, an impression, to bring us back through the revelation of signs, universal knowledge. Completely inscribed in his African history, in the Bété tribe he is a citizen of the world by virtue of his curiosity, the insolence of his writings, and the nonconformity of his education, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is a sage who embodies all that is now on the verge of extinction.

 

"Frédéric Bruly Bouabré observes everything that is on the surface of things and gives us a reading of what he sees on the skin of things. In his work, outside of the alphabet that he calls "Knowledge of the World," most of his drawings, I'm thinking particularly of the reading of the divine signs, on the cola, on the orange, on the fruit in general, for him it's a divine writing, all he does is observe it, reveal it and transmit it, sometimes these signs are directly legible and he interprets them, comments on them. When, on the other hand, they are indecipherable he makes them so to us, thus specifying that they are divine signs and that man is sometimes small to claim to have an intelligible reading of divine messages"( André Magnin).

 

On the occasion of the exhibition, the film "Nadro" (1998) by director Ivana Massetti was shown, which takes us to the Ivory Coast, retracing some stages of Bouabré's life in a fascinating visual style.

Ivana Massetti of her film says, "The film captures everything that will no longer exist in the next millennium. All this we will never see again. In the near future, this figure will become part of an iconography that will be studied on CD ROMs and communicated on the Internet, the virtual image of a virtual reality. In the film, the man and the artist coexist. In the film, his face is there-his stubborn expression, his gaze, his voice. A real presence, not an echo. It is the joy, warmth and beauty of an encounter. Our encounter. The fulfillment of a journey. A journey of initiation, in which the disciple's gaze magnifies the master. Stories possible only between human beings."