Artist Profile

Oumar Ball

ARTIST BIO

Press Release

For his first exhibition in Ivory Coast, Oumar BALL, native of Mauritania, offers us the quintessence of his artistic work.Both a painter and a sculptor, trained by his father with whom he made his first exhibition, now aged 38, he has probably reached this golden period when, after years of groping, a creator finally achieves peak of his creativity and masters his methods of expression.Others exhausted themselves along the way and finished saying what little they had to say, Oumar BALL continues to enchant us in his interlacing of iron wires that he unites to make them express themselves, pieces of sheet metal and shards of enameled basins, when he does not give rhythm and volume to his already exceptional canvases.It is a true synthesis to which we are entitled because the artist rarely exhibits his two favorite mediums, iron and canvas, together, in such a consciously organized fusion.Everything starts from a wall on which Oumar BALL represented one of his landscapes, those inspired by the banks of the Senegal River and the sands of the Sahara which are his native domain.Charcoal, coal, nature appears to us in its arid simplicity and beauty. Iron wires escape, real tentacles which radiate the space and create the decor by directing the viewer in the direction chosen by the artist.And the magic begins, a veritable “carnival of animals” which descend from the canvases to walk around, thus magically passing from two to three dimensions.Is it painting, is it sculpture?Quite simply the expression of a man who is still young and who cares about the future of our raging world which destroys everything in its path, without taking the time to restore its beauty to the slightest debris, to the slightest extra soul that allow us these works so intuitively arranged.And we start dreaming, joining the dance, no longer knowing where to turn, a little intoxicated by these animals which are larger than life and which remind us of our human condition.Above all, we must not stay on this side of the mirror, Oumar BALL calls us and draws us into his universe from which we are never sure of returning unscathed.Let us do it, he opens the doors of his marvelous kingdom for a few weeks, we would be very wrong to stay outside!