ECB with Joby Bernabé

Jocelyn Akwaba Matignon transcends with his paintings the evidence of linear genealogy and its mythification of a supposed original purity. In the proposed exhibition, at the Blandin Jarry space, he shows a retrospective of 20 years of work.
We find the series "Spirit of the Earth" strongly marked by the use of matter (earth, ashes, fossilized plants). These often large canvases are reminiscent of his belonging to the land and the artist created them thanks to the telluric vibrations that enveloped him at that time.
To this end, the artist-painter proposed to Joby Bernabé his collaboration to highlight and put into words their common perception of the interplay of very different cultures that come to nourish our specific Caribbean culture (notion of rhizome, dear to Edouard Glissant)
For this poet from Martinique in his sixties, internationally recognized, the texts follow the traces of the words that solicit his voice and reinforce his way.
As for Akwaba Matignon with his paintings, the barriers of languages, cultures and fashions, are erased before the emotional relevance of the universal artistic language.
It is thus to a singular approach of a productive, constructive and projective vision that the two artists invite us to follow. It is a manifestation of the mundiality, notion dear to E. Glissant; indeed it will be a question of a mutual enrichment, on the intellectual, spiritual, and sensitive level. In the context of globalization, the West Indies deserve their full share in the "saying" of the world, in the understanding of Man himself.
Joby Bernabé places his texts in the heart of nature and human beings.
Jocelyn Akwaba Matignon places his paintings in the heart of the human being and the symbols of the World, of the Inframonde