Sadikou Oukpedjo’s works seem to manage time on their own. Their autonomy is manifested in the singular treatment given to figures, especially in the primordial gestures and expressions, worthy of an archaeological will, interested more in the behavior of forms than in anatomical accuracy. At the same time, it’s not uncommon to see contemporary symbols in his work capable of translating geopolitical conflicts linked to the power of imperialist countries. A machine gun and a US flag suggest a critical contextualization of the present. This complex intersection between past and present elevates his production to a state of chronological suspension, confronting and challenging any notions of temporality.

However, there is another aspect of his production that is committed to revising earthly rules: the magical force that the artist represents and interprets. It was after his participation in the Biennale de Dakar in 2014 that he began his series of works featuring drawings of therianthropic figures, hybrids of animal and human, common in the imaginary that has been created about cave paintings.

Sadikou schematizes these colossal bodies in deep transmutation, in the manner of entities. Far removed from the category of human, they are drawn as superior forces in a constant duel with each other. Although their silhouettes and countenances are represented introspectively, they often simulate direct confrontation, if not fused in combat as if they were already immobilized. Their references evoke myths and fantastic beings from different cultures performing mundane actions in a pantheon illustrated by ethereal colors and situations involving animalistic beings that border on the fable-like.

Likewise, his practice with wooden sculptures, which began even earlier, at the end of the 1990s, operates in the dichotomy of ancestral and contemporary time. And it suggests, once again, bodies-entities that are always comfortable with their physical state, even under the aggrandizement of forms. Unlike the two-dimensional works, however, the hybrid of animal and human appears more timidly.

By decentralizing his studies from the perspective of human knowledge, he finds other possibilities for reading reality in the spiritual world. He chooses to access the sensible through other cosmogonies at the service of interpreting the human psyche, but also the political relationships inherent to humanity.