Nos géographies intimes: Hervé Yamguen

On the occasion of his second solo exhibition at AFIKARIS gallery, Hervé Yamguen presents Nos géographies intimes (Our Intimate Geographies), a body of drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, and wooden masks that extends a central reflection in his work: that of the visible and invisible forces involved in shaping who we are and the way we inhabit the world.

The exhibition emerges from a question that is at once intimate and universal: what are we made of? For Hervé Yamguen, a human being can never be reduced to what the eye can perceive. Each of us carries within us landscapes, memories, wounds and dreams. The places we have passed through remain within us, as do family histories, singular experiences and collective upheavals that often silently shape the way we perceive reality. Identity thus appears as a shifting cartography, made up of layers and correspondences, where the intimate resonates with what surrounds it. As the artist writes in La fenêtre de mes rêves (The Window of My Dreams):

“Words raise

Before us

A great mirror

Where faces, memories,

And landscapes drift by”

The spoken word becomes a territory here. For while the face reveals a presence, it can never fully disclose what makes up a being. The importance of words is rooted in the artist’s own experience. In the rituals, chants and stories passed down within the chiefdom where he is a notable, spoken words become a link to the land, plants, ancestors and all living things. They inscribe themselves within him as inner vibrations that later find their way into his work.

A multidisciplinary artist, Yamguen is above all a poet. Poetry lies at the heart of his expression, whatever material it takes as its form. Painting, drawing and sculpture become different languages through which to receive what words set in motion. And if language opens a door onto this lived invisible world, the artist’s hybrid figures give it a body. Faces, silhouettes, trees, birds and vegetal forms intermingle without ever quite merging. Far from offering a fixed representation of identity, these beings seem to be traversed by time and their environment. Their appearance bears the memory of seasons, encounters and experiences. “They are like trees,” the artist explains. “The seasons change trees.”

Nourished by African cosmologies, animist thought and the philosophy of Ubuntu — “I am because we are” — Yamguen’s work asserts that existence is built through relationship. The human is never presented as separate from the living world, but as one of its many expressions, shaped as much by the memories of those who came before as by what surrounds them. In Yamguen’s work, the presence of ancestors is essential. They are not understood as figures belonging solely to the past, but as beings who remain active in the present. Each person enters an existence that precedes them: knowledge has been passed down, gestures learned, stories entrusted, a culture received.

As in the work Lieu-racine en soi (Root-Place Within), the tree becomes a metaphor for identity and transmission. Beneath the earth, the roots carry what came before; above, the branches open towards possible futures. The faces unfolding through the canopy evoke the multiplicity of presences that make up a being, while the bird at the heart reminds us that being rooted can come an impulse towards the unknown. The tree thus becomes an image of existence itself: a being connected to its origins, yet open to the paths that remain to be travelled. Identity is shaped over time, through sedimentation as much as through movement. It is inheritance and becoming, memory and projection.

This principle of passage is also reflected in the materials and techniques. The wooden masks enter into dialogue with bronze sculptures made in Foumban using the lost-wax technique, bringing ancestral know-how into conversation with a resolutely contemporary artistic language. Drawings give rise to volumes, volumes extend the paintings; each medium seems to carry on from the one before it, as though the same breath were moving from one material to another.

Places, too, form part of this sensitive geography. A childhood home, a territory left willingly or under duress, a land one discovers or loses: each of these spaces leaves a mark. Places become reservoirs of memory, inhabited long after we have moved away from them. Yet intimate geographies are never separate from the collective reality in which they emerge. The series Conscience agro-poétique (Agro-Poetic Consciousness) extends this reflection by inviting us to recognise the interdependencies that connect humans, animals, plants and the cosmos. Against the grain of an age founded on separation and domination, the artist imagines a more hospitable relationship with the living world, one in which art might help reconnect the threads that bind beings together.

“It is from the window

Of my dreams

And from what happens to me

When I travel

The paths of our struggling breaths

That I welcome and draw

Signs and trees

In the notebook of our intimate geographies.”

The exhibition thus becomes a space of resonance, where the works offer not merely images to contemplate, but sensitive territories to traverse. They invite each of us to recognise the landscapes that inhabit us, the presences that accompany us, and the traces that have shaped our histories. They remind us that the intimate is never an island: it is traversed by others, by places, by inheritances, by the movements of the world.

Perhaps this is, in the artist’s own words, a way of “holding one’s heart in beauty between one’s hands,” so that “kindness may make its star shine amid the raging tides of passing time.”

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