Carambolage (Carom Shots): Salifou Lindou

"Carambolage"—a French term borrowed from billiards—refers to a shot where the cue ball hits two other balls in succession. Beyond its sporting use, the word "carambolage" evokes a series of impacts, ricochets, collisions, and sometimes even car crashes.

 

This idea forms the conceptual framework of the exhibition, unfolding as a visual and symbolic circuit. The viewer’s gaze is invited to carom from one work to the next, to catch contrasts and echoes, to find delight in unexpected dialogues and juxtapositions. The scenography rejects chronological order in favor of a zigzagging drift—revealing the timeless, even polytemporal, nature that runs through Lindou’s entire body of work.

 

His practice moves intuitively—sparked by impulse, chance, or a momentary pull—generating a multidirectional explosion of forms and motifs, where early series brush against recent pieces. Through this interplay and persistence of elements, Lindou weaves a net of resonances rooted in family traditions: the gesture of a grandfather braiding halters and ropes for livestock, or the intricate knitting of his mother. “I always come back to it,” he says. “It’s the foundation of my work.” But this return is not repetition—it is an excavation, a deepening of a visual universe inhabited by curves and counter-curves, intersecting lines and counterpoints.

 

This narrative thread comes to life in Histoire d’une journée (2013), whose comic-strip-like structure unfolds the chaotic tale of a man leaving the city for Kribi, a coastal town in southern Cameroon. Checkerboard composition, sequential vignettes, alternating between subjective and collective viewpoints—all continue investigations begun in earlier double-sided, untitled works from 2006, imagined as fragmented projection surfaces. The 2013 piece emerges as a collage of narrative and memory, drawing together different phases of Lindou’s practice in a temporality that moves like his line—circling, turning, veering.

 

La Pose (2023)—encountered upon entering the gallery—crystallizes these dynamics and sends them outward. Echoes of the Collines rouges series (2018–2023) surface through stylized flowers embedded in an urban landscape punctuated by clusters of corrugated iron dwellings. This framed setting offers a painting within the painting, adding yet another layer of fragmentation. Vernacular architecture—rendered through modest materials like sheet metal—is a constant thread in Lindou’s work, appearing raw in installations like Cabines de relookage (2001) and Urban Scénos (2003), evoked in paintings, or embodied in metal panels used as backgrounds, as in La Pose and Vil’Hasard 1 & 2 (2013).

 

Another recurring bloom: the sunflower. It blossoms in the drawing series Les Collines de l’espoir (2023), where its yellow hue mirrors the color of taxis, underscoring the dented, accident-prone nature of roads and vehicles. It reappears in Fleurs des décombres(2021), a sculpture that carries the legacy of the installation-performance Albatros (2013). The sunflower embodies a fragile beauty that emerges from hardship—symbolizing both the twilight of post-independence dreams and the hope of a new dawn for Cameroon. Yet this solar figure also casts shadows: Fleurs des décombres points to a corruption scandal that rocked the country—a scandal that sparked a broader critique in Lindou’s series Les Politiciens (2021–2024), a searing portrait of a verbose, inert elite deaf to the suffering of the people.

 

La Pose is also, perhaps most importantly, a portrait of a woman. The seated, leaning figure—highlighted by the title—is a recurring motif in Lindou’s work. It resonates with La Femme à l’abat-jour (2015), another composition marked by the presence of a glass or bottle. These quiet hints at alcohol introduce another facet of his practice: scenes of escape, conviviality, or drift—glimpsed in early works like Boîte d’encre sur la table (2001) and Le Bibineur (2006). These are psychological portraits—transparent, flesh-and-blood. Salifou Lindou observes his peers with empathy, striving to capture that invisible substance that is the human soul — sheet of metal, battered, dented, searing—yet malleable, forged under the pounding of white-hot fists.

 

The Flûtistes series (2019) and the canvas Moment of Music (2024) crystallize this existential dimension. Here, music breathes as a spiritual poultice, a ritual of survival—and life beyond. The bodies are leaf-like, evoking a woody humanity: rooted and torn, knotted and raw. In Carambolage, Salifou Lindou lays his cards on the table. The artist has made his play—and his bet is on humanity. Despite the collisions and the chaos. A carambolage of human experience, as disordered as it is vital.

 

— Curated by Louise Thurin