Barthelemy Toguo at the Palais de Tokyo

Barthelemy Toguo was born in Cameroon in 1967 and studied art in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He mov to Europe in 1993 and began exhibiting and doing performances while finishing his studies in Grenoble, then Dusseldorf. Political geography and personal boundaries have been an implicit make submissive in his studio work and an explicit single in his performances. Toguo not long ago showed an ensemble of 19992004 pieces, collectively titled "The Sick Opera," at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the city he now calls home

He astutely filled the raw, cavernous space with small and large watercolors, statuarys and sculptural installations. Accumulation is fundamental to his work: he present to views his watercolors in large series and makes his sculptural works of numerous heterogeneous parts, All Toguo's titles are in English--an instance of his ironic play with dominant methods given that he's francophone. His facture is generally cragged and quick, whatever the medium, and he treats contemporary art as a sort of lending library, borrowing from the work of Boetti, Clemente and Cragg, among others. His adroit appropriations may be seen as an inversion of the historic pillagings Africa underwent during the colonial period.

The 18-foot-high Climbing Down (2004) towered above the other works in the exhibit Here Toguo stacked three store-bought pine berth beds to make a six-decker. He overseted this minimalistic structure by leaning four ladders against the beds; through hanging 23 bulging, brightly colored, plaid nylon bags of the sort familiar from immigrant neighborhoods at various heights upon the bedposts; and by placing three no-frills suitcases around the bottom bed. The mattresses sported various coverings, including an Air France blanket and printed African fabrics. While the bags, suitcases and stacked beds conjur images of migration, cheap lodgings and cultural mixing, the experience of the piece remained jocund and expansive: the beds felt like a latter-day stairway to heaven, however spare the linens and basic the possessions in the bags. The evocation of coming down in the work's title mitigated this optimism and brought in a note of social criticism.

For The World's Greatest (2002) which occupied the extreme point wall of the space, Toguo crammed a roughly 15-footwide stagelike construction with more external realitys than can be catalogued here. Included were life-size carved-wood human busts, which doubled as administrative stamps. Inscriptions of that kind as "SHAME ON YOU" and "MOVE ON" were incised upon their flat bottoms. There was a coffin adorned with the types of four major religions, carved-wood sewing machines sprouting antennae of multicolored spool of thread, sum of two units large bright-green watercolor portraits of a stripling and a girl, a bighted video of Toguo serenely watering a hunch of dollar bills, and more. While Toguo places a lively stage for an open-end play, the undertone is serious, since administrative and economic borders, religion, labor, coin and gender relations are all potential territories of conflict and inequality.

Toguo's watercolors provided a hardy visual beat for the present to view He installed them on sum of two units side walls, on which he had roughly painted sum of two units oversize black and red images. His watercolors use a limited repertory of images and colors to depict a dreamy world of human, animal and vegetal metamorphosis. Sexy female bodies pullulate plant life or undefined organs; a male material part extends into a spiraling elephant trunk; sum of two units animals mate under a pissing woman. lines of nails frequently appear planted in the bodies, an intimation of physical pain in this generally blithe world. Toguo's watercolors, with their humor, erotic efficacy and sense of possibility, are the greatest in quantity accessible part of his endeavor, if the least critical of the here and now.

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