ETHIOPIA
Guest of honour of the Grand BAZ'ART 2015
The name of Michael Bethe-Selassie, composed of ”Beth” which means ”home”, and ”Selassie” ”Trinity”, plays on both words, referencing the artist’s ancestral legacy, HIS Trinity-Home, Abyssinia: this word, a melting-pot in its four cardinal points for Christianity, Animism, Islam, Judaism, and even a little Roman paganism, lulled his childhood. Its contradictions and complementarities illustrate an approach turned towards the roots, intelligent and curious enough to encroach on other African cultures and to integrate Western knowledge.
These elements invest a powerful creation, folkloric in the noblest sense of the term, and most profoundly allocentric. However, before «migrating» towards foreign connotations, Michael Bethe-Selassie goes back to the gestures of the craftsman, sketching a framework of rattan sticks and enforcing it with metal mesh. Then, with small immemorial gestures of the hand, he covers this infrastructure with a multitude of potato-chips, of wet cellulose agglomerates. By and by, he obliterates the ”skeleton” of this still anonymous ”being”.
Curious creations, mixtures of flat characters on embossed steeds, dangling chariots that ferry charioteers facing backward… But these paradoxes are only apparent, because, once the ”coloured” skin is laid, the extreme elegance generated by this disequilibrium shows that, if the two elements supposedly belong to different mental schemes, they have in fact been conceived ”together”.
Still more surprising are the altars, genuine cities with numerous nooks inside which one can find nested characters, for none of the artist’s works present lonely characters. Even the least developed become a sort of votive offerings bearing figurines, each generating another one with its eyes wide open on life, its legs embossed, its arms sticking closely to its sides.
For ”Men were given the right to roam the world, not to touch it” (¹). Like on Black African granary-doors, a whole symbolical genealogy covers Bethe-Selassie’s multifaceted megaliths: above, the patriarch, majestic and benevolent, then his warriors, etc.
Everywhere, dark passages open, because custom demands that travellers be allowed to ”walk in through all the gates of the city”(¹). And the colours! Extracted like those of cave paintings from crushed sills and stones, their polychromies give the works the vibrating heat of ritual tones, the rhythmic harmonies of crimson reds, the blues of the bright wide skies, the ochres of the thirsty earth in the desert…
Finally, the wonderful unity of Michael Bethe-Selassie’s artwork shows that through his self-asserted Africanity he is sometimes in accord with his circumnavigations and ethnological explorations: even the coloured cromlechs, the Magi, the circus acrobats… which, although they make him take a detour through Western civilizations, they actually bring him back to the palavers, the dances, the totems casting their protective shadow over the ancestral village.
CIRCUMNAVIGATIONS ET ETHNOLOGIE
Jeanine RIVAIS-SMOLEC
Contact :
micsel@me.com
mickael-bethe-selassie.com
Éthiopie