Les mondes de l'oiseau-conteur

About

Hervé Yamguen is part of the first generation of contemporary Cameroonian artists. His work was displayed at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris in 2022 during the exhibition Sur la route des chefferies du Cameroun. 

The storyteller bird is a metaphor for the visual artist, whose creations translate and convey the forms and stories of the universe. The faces interweave and merge to give life to hybrid beings, witnesses to the connections between living beings.

The exhibition revolves around Yamguen’s poetry. His visual works support and follow the verses that tell the story of the storyteller bird’s world. The artist, himself a storyteller bird, shares his vision of life, revealing the invisible and the wonders hidden deep inside the universe. Beings appear intertwined in an eternal movement, caught between their ancestral and future lives.

Yamguen illustrates the vital energy that animates and accompanies living beings throughout their history, which appears to be, in reality, a shared history.

The bronze sculptures combine elements borrowed from his pictorial works – these same elements arise from common motifs.

The artist transcribes the forms of the universe. These multiple shapes, which mutate and combine in an infinite movement, demonstrate the connections between human beings and the cosmos. They exist through each other. The Ubuntu philosophy “I can’t be without you” infuses Yamguen’s art, attesting to the intimate bounds existing within creation.

The storyteller bird knows how to see beyond the visible and listen to the vibrations of the universe beyond the audible. The worlds he unveils in this exhibition sketch out the sensitive poetry of the world as we know it.