ART REFLEX INTERNATIONAL

       Francis MBELLA's Exhibition : " GLANCE ON THE WOMAN " Art Reflex International Center MARCH-APRIL 2001  

                                                                                   The duty to communicate 

   Language requires a second phase, the art of communicating. Now, since symbolism, the counterpart to what is unexpressed,  or what is reputed to be impossible to express, has indeed invested a strange type of prestige in obscurity, an innate value.

     Our epoch has merit of recognising it has serious duty stagnate in old, threadbare forms, which, because they are worn out and used, have become repetitive and inexpressive. And this is healthy, moreover, in period governed by large aspirations and ambitions for its civilisations, and while this is not enough, it remains quietly active.

     It is up to art above all that belongs the duty to forge an expression of what aspires to be. This is, doubtless, why the public, moved by its deepest instincts, grants it such a place in the present time.

     Modern art should not be restricted to the self-satisfaction of artist merely enjoying themselves. For art and art alone, has the sole power to initiate and to install in the outer visible world, a new reality, something any artist worthy of the name bears within himself, innovation successfully and completely carrying out its mission as language.

            Danièle de Ricci,  Art Reflex International (Archives)

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

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CHATTANOOGA TN 37407

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