Fair - DrawingNow 2025
Mbaye Diop, Portrait d'un cafetier #2, 2025, oil pastel and graphite on paper, 70x51 CM. Courtesy Mbaye Diop and Selebe Yoon, Dakar.
26-30 Mars 2025, Carreau du Temple, Paris
For his first participation at Drawing Now Art Fair 2025 - Section Insight, Selebe Yoon is pleased to present a solo stand dedicated to the drawings and animated films of Senegalese artist Mbaye Diop.
In the bustling city centre of the Senegalese capital, Mbaye Diop follows the daily route of one of the many itinerant coffee sellers, identifiable by their red carts. Moving on foot between the main arteries and narrow streets, often against the flow of traffic, the artist depicts the journey of an individual trying to find his way through a tumultuous metropolis, wandering between buildings that still have their roots in colonial history
PoussPouss (2025), his latest animated film, is made from thousands of images and drawings which, with the use of an acetone-based photographic transfer process, are transferred to paper and then assembled by stop-motion technology. This technique gives the film a slightly jarring dynamism and a ghostly effect, plunging the viewer into the heart of the Senegalese capital while preserving the materiality of the drawingsAs the character moves eagerly through the city, its colonial architectural history and contemporary contradictions unfold in the background. Our gaze moves from a building in the neo-Sudanese style, to old shacks topped with tiles, to an architecture with geometric forms that recall the notion of asymmetrical parallelism advocated by Léopold Sédar Senghor. The grandeur of these buildings juxtaposes and contrasts with the precarious and temporary structures. Using a precise graphic technique, the artist captures the effervescence of the place - the swarming of people and cars, all disappearing in the sequence of images. The light seems to engulf the city and its inhabitants, sometimes discreet between the pencil strokes, sometimes dazzling. In this way, Mbaye Diop reinforces the ephemerality of forms and the fragility of existences through the technique he uses, and conveys the solitude of a man captured in urban entropy. In his sensitive approach to the city, Mbaye Diop reflects on the trajectories and spaces inhabited by itinerant merchants, who survive in a daily economy known as 'informal', while their trade is threatened with prohibition in West Africa as a result of the policies of eviction to respond to the imperative of urban modernisation
Following in the footsteps of his predecessors who took urban life as the starting point for visual reflection, such as the filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty with "Contras City" (1969) or Bouna Médoune Sèye and his photographs "Les Trottoirs de Dakar" (1992), Mbaye Diop paints a "disarchitecture" of the city, an aesthetic disorganisation, and a cohabitation of various codes and systems.
A series of works on paper entitled "Portrait d'un cafetier", 2025, in pastel and graphite, complete the presentation. Each drawing captures the liveliness and transience of everyday street life, where so many paths cross for a brief moment.
Part of “LIGHT LEAK”, a curated selection by independent art critic and curator Claire Luna, and of architect and designer Pierre Yovanovitch’s favourites at Drawing Now 2025.
Mbaye Diop, Portrait d'un cafetier #16, 2025, Graphite on paper, 51x36CM. Courtesy Mbaye Diop and Selebe Yoon, Dakar.
OPENING HOURS DrawingNow
Wednesday March 26, 2025 | 11:00 - 20:00 (upon invitation)
Thursday March 26, 2025 | 11:00 - 20:00 (public)
Friday March 27, 2025 | 11:00 - 20:00 (public)
Saturday March 28, 2025 | 11:00 - 20:00 (public)
Sunday March 29, 2025 | 11:00 - 19:00 (public)
LOCATION
Carreau du Temple - 4 Rue Eugène Spuller, 75003 Paris