exhibition KHOKHO RENÉ-CORAIL THE SECRET LIFE OF A REVOLT

Through pieces created between 1963 and 1998, this retrospective exhibition aims both to pay tribute to the Khokho’s unique journey and demonstrate the abundant wealth, rare diversity and the fundamental originality of his work.

It invites us to follow his formal approaches, which are highly varied yet united by a series of themes that each seem to call upon the other; to grasp the conceptual choices, connected by a purposefully tight thread, which inscribes them in an encompassing vision of the world; to understand the many references it conjures, which highlight the artistic, aesthetic, political, philosophical and religious questions that fuel it.

All this intermingles to give the work a quality of total freedom. René Corail’s curiosity about the widest variety of techniques (ceramics, painting, sculpture, murals, architecture, stylism, etc.); the forces that drive him, the marks of his energy, his sense of invention; his own unique delight in capturing the infinite aspects of his homeland and transforming them into the catalysts for his work; the desire to rise from his roots to heights that transcend the limits of his island; the creative momentum aroused by his favourite subjects and personal passions; the unexpected depths revealed by his thoughts; the humanist spirit that fuelled his creations; his faith in an art that opposed dominant values through the liberating power of its aesthetic dimension, its thirst for knowledge and emotion; the language and style that allowed him to make himself understood by vast numbers of people.

Khokho built his art on a fondness for his culture, a constant attention to people, a return to his roots, a reinterpretation of founding myths, a history stripped of all its clichés, the construction of an identity, staying true to his own convictions, reformulating the idea of militancy and imagining a better future. He made use of all the resources of these strengths.

His art is also built on a textural roaming of the country. All the paths he forged – in nature and time, but also in the fabric of representation, the aesthetic and formal arrangement of his works – cross over, interlace, overlap, echo one another, lead from one to the other and break down barriers. A network of conspiring trajectories that constantly creates and reinvents a territory haunted by the spirit of resistance at the centre of which, at his hands, these forces converge at their zenith.