The paper medium has been of great importance to Kokou Ferdinand since his childhood. Today, drawing remains the privileged form of Kokou his purest inner expressions. Over the years, he has experimented with several drawing techniques and developed an intimate relationship with the paper medium as a plane for the movement of line, volume and form.
Kokou Makouvia about his series:
Les Coups de Pilon d’ailleurs ouvrirent le ciel qui goutte d’or (The Pestle Blows from elsewhere opened the sky which drops of gold), is one of the new drawing projects I started in March 2020, during the period of pandemic, the health crisis by which the whole world was heavily impacted.
These drawn moments is for me a recalcitrant resistance to the shock caused by this pandemic which prevents any contact with the outside world and where «the other» is above all supposed to be the ultimate danger to oneself. For me, it is also a piece of writing about our relationship with the ever-changing world and all that surrounds us, whether visible or invisible.
It also reveals the umbilical connectivity that links humans to themselves and to others, to things/objects, to animals, to time and space, like a rhizome, and which reveals to us the gigantic and perfectly unbreakable web that the world has always been.
Here, the elements of reality merge; the object becomes a subject or even an extension of a body and is henceforth inhabited by vibrating in the same diapason as the spiritualised beings.
In Les Coups de Pilon d’ailleurs ouvrirent le ciel qui goutte d’or, it is a question of performing the space and the objects found in it to then project lines and forms resulting from the versatile movements of the body in trance in the space. The drawing could be a superimposed layer of mirror-images of the place, taken indefinitely without time limit. Les Coups de Pilon d’ailleurs ouvrirent le ciel qui goutte d’or is above all the image of a transversal cut in this mass, revealing all the vital energy of the movement that makes the space vibrate.