Barthélémy Toguo studied at the Abidjan School of Fine Arts, Ivory Coast; the Grenoble graduate school of art, France; and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He is currently setting up the Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, an institution providing facilities and resources to visual and performing artists. The official opening is scheduled for 2007.

Toguo staged a solo exhibition titled The Sick Opera at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in December 2004, his second institutional solo show in Paris after Migrateurs at the Musée d’Art Moderne in 1999. His installation Rain on a Private Garden was recently included on Notre Histoire, also at the Palais de Tokyo (2006). Other group shows include the currently touring Africa Remix; African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi collection at the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC (2005); the 1998 and 2000 Dakar biennales; and Political Ecology at White Box and Drawing Fall at the Drawing Center, both in New York in 2001.

Toguo makes imaginative use of the full spectrum of media available to him, combining painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video and performance, usually displayed side by side within a dramatised space. In these circus-like installations, he is a ringmaster, and his artworks are made to perform and surprise in unexpected ways. They can tease and tantalise, disturb and seduce. The overall theatrical display encompasses humour, anxiety, the absurd and the erotic; it is discursive and expansive, resisting classification or reduction to single narratives. The phallic and feminine can be entwined, his intention can be certain and contradictory, he can be the joker and the critic.

Throughout Toguo’s work there are references to physical and relative distance, travel and journeys, and to transgressing the political and social boundaries that limit our movement and imagination. His sculptural customs stamps and prints, and a series of performances entitled Transit in airports, train stations and other points of departure, illustrate how integral negotiating our transit between places and spaces has become in our time. He says:

We are all in a permanent “transit” state. It’s a notion that is inherent in 20th and 21st-century man. Whether a man is white, black or yellow matters little. He is in any case a being who is potentially “exiled”, borne along by the driving force that is travel and which is going to make him move. We leave one place for another … while bringing along with us during these different journeys our culture, which runs up against the other. Of course, this coming together can be either beautiful or difficult. The trips follow one another at the frenetic pace of our society today. We are constantly in motion. So this notion of transit is more than ever relevant to the present ...(1)

Through his various series of drawings, Dream Catchers, What’s your name?, Festivals of Grapes, Baptism and Das Bett, Toguo celebrates the human body by sketching incomplete, amputated figures whose gestures are left up in the air, he explains, lest he restrict their potential to define beauty and life itself – the obsession that is his daily inspiration.

(1)Sans, Jérome, ‘Toguo Digests the World’ in Barthélémy Toguo: The Sick Opera (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004), 12.

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