ART REFLEX INTERNATIONAL

                   Francis MBELLA's Exhibition: "THE COLOUR AND THE FAITH" in UNESCO-Paris, November 2003

                                   UNITED NATIONS EDUCATIONAL, SCIENTIFIC AND CULTURAL ORGANISATION

                                                                       ACTION AND THE MEANING OF ART ?

       What then is art, if the idea of beauty which confuses everything, is rejected? In order to define art precisely, you must start by ceasing to consider it a means of pleasure and viewing art instead as one of the condiitions of human life. Considered this way, we can not avoid concluding that art is one of major means men have of communicating with each other.

       All works of art function in this way, the audience, to a certain extent, enters into communication with its creator, and with all others who, before or after him, received or will receive the same artistic impression. Art  functions like words, wich link men together by expressing their thoughts and their experiences. But this means of communication is specific and differs from the word through wich man communicates his thoughts, whereas by art man communicates his feelings. 

   Art operates through the fact that a man who perceives through hearing or through sight the feelings expressed by another man, is able to feel the same things as he who expressed them.

                                                                                                                                                  Art Reflex International (Archives)

                          JAZZ CONCERT IN LAUSANNE - SWITZERLAND , "THEATRE DE BEAULIEU", 06 JUNE 2003

              Art is another way of resting from work while indirectly sharing feelings in a social context. It always takes two people for there to be an art experience.. The creator of the work of art and the receiver, who can be a spectator or a listener. The artist creates while the other receives. This is the aspect which is particular to art, in that it is experienced passively; for being entertained through art means having nothing to do, it is enough just to look and listen in order to feel pleasure and to be entertained. That no effort is needed, because the artist is in full control, is exactly what separates artistic activity from activity of other kinds.

                Francis MBELLA, Guest of Honour, with Doctor Gabs and his band, Rhoda Scott and Robert Palmer

FRANCIS MBELLA FASHION SHOW AT THE LOUVRE CARROUSEL IN PARIS IN FAVOR OF CHILDREN AFFECTED BY SICK CELL - DECEMBER 2003

  And art had always allowed one to follow the visible tracesof thought processes, it now seems clear it can do more even than that. It is the traces of the whole interior life of the spirit which it can give form to. Previously man thought merely in a clear and rational way and art was often reduced nearly to illustrating it. Now after the long journey along the road of individualism, man is fascinated by what till than had escaped him, everithing beyond the relatively exclusive boundaries which respect for reason alone had enclosed him in.

               This loose vague world in which interior life finds all of its opportunities even at an early unconscious level is his and that of our time as well.

                And in the new traces it follows driven to find unknown riches art becomes his official companion the only one able to adapt to all circumstances and unexpected expressions which doubtless accounts for the increasingly important role it plays in today's intellectual life.

                Art use to be attempted to be explained trrought society whereas it is art itself which really explains how that society feels and develops and functions. Art used to be considered an ornament, an accessory to social life which is true but it would be more useful by far to analyse its real purpose and function in our society.

               Art is the best way of allowing the unconscious to speak.

                Plastic shades and subjective relief, Francis MBELLA is from France-Cameroon. Born December 18, 1961 in Douala, Sculptor-father and mother a seamstress, fashion designer, graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he devoted himself to painting from its beginnings in search of new forms of expression and rose to prominence in 1987 as a painter of relief, throught his technical Tapioca (cassava flour).

                Cultural Merit from the city of Paris in 1990 and Cultural Merit of the State of California in 1994, he won a third time this distinction in June 2004 to UNG, United Nations in Geneva.

                 There are two techniques in his work.

          1. Tapioca (alliance of cassava flour with oil or acrylic) to reflect the accuracy of sensations: the real is transfigured by emotion, subjectivity.

          2. The technique of inkcolors, a prospective method of objectification of feelings expressed by a superposition of work surfaces and levels. The artist builds on geometric forms, the construction of surfaces and the balance of volumes.

                  Around these new forms of expression, creative vigilance against the straightness of changing forms and matter for consumption of artistic production that is not encumbered symbolic connotations but reflects the very ability of its contents.

                 Reflexes chromatic expression of that thought dear to the artist who creates in his audience to think that power the individual as part of general around several books such as "small talk on the work painted" published by Pascal Merlot in 1987, a book on the theory and the psychology of art, "The Reflections of Color" published by CIP in 1988, and his latest book published in French and English, on Arts Education "The Treaty of Aesthetics" published by Menaibuc.

              He also directed a number of exhibitions and conferences in Paris, Moscow, Anvers, Geneve, Lausanne, Berlin, Douala, Yaoundé, Hamburg, Cologne, London, Munich, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando and Clearwater.

             Francis Mbella is among those who think that art is important. In the sameway that the body cannot live without exchange with the outside world, throught breathing, for example, art is necessary for the mental life for which there is a kind of breathing. Its role and relevance only discovered by the gateway of a philosophical and spiritual. And it's the human condition and its principle that it is necessary to consider whether we want to measure its place.

PERMANENT EXHIBITION IN USA

MARGARITE SICARD GALLERY

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CHATTANOOGA TN 37407

Email: mmsicard@comcast.net