By Mohammed Bella
The 39-year-old Ivorian artist will be painting directly on the walls, offering visitors a spectacle of colorful creation.
Mederic Turay is an avant-garde artist shaping the landscape of today’s African art. Turay’s canvases are known for their effusion of colors and multicultural faces. His artworks are a language of colorful symbols that transcend conventional forms.
Turay, winner of the SIFCOM Group’s Best Young Artist of West Africa award in 1997, has created an unconventional art form known as Artphomanism (Traces).
African Digital Art describes the new wave as “the need for absolute sobriety, deprivation, the need to go to the elemental form, the parameters restricted to the essentials; with the building blocks of our African roots. A methodical ritual that invites you to travel mentally to other places, other stories and in history.”
Through his brushstrokes, Turay conveys the evolution of African culture and the diversity and reality of the continent. Critics often compare Turay to his greatest inspirations, neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat and cubist Pablo Picasso, an analogy he is very proud of.
“I am an African with a capital A. I’m a dreamer, and my dreams have no limits. The impossible is just a word. Africa is the mother lode of great talent, but the talent platforms are very rare,” Turay told Medi1 TV.
He continued, “It is heartwarming to see Moroccans adopt and appreciate my art. Morocco has always been like a second country to me.”
Turay has previously attended art galleries and events in Morocco, such as the African Dreamer gallery in La Galerie 38 in Casablanca.
In 2017, he transformed the train that links Casablanca-Rabat-Kenitra into art work during the cultural event Africa in the Capital. The international artist painted the train with colorful graffiti. Turay also produced two frescoes on the facade of the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat.
