Yapi Roger

Yapi Roger has a 25-year career in painting and sculpture. Born in Katiola in the north of the Ivory Coast, he began to draw innately at a very young age. Young adult, he enrolled at the Charles Bieth’s Technical Centre in Abengourou, then at the Technical Centre for Applied Arts in Bingerville.

From ropes he uses in all his creations, he traces the dark stories of the African continent: Slavery, recurrent wars, and endemic diseases. All these themes are engraved in his works by a complexity of signs to be decoded and possessed, revealing his resolutely humanist temperament.

In fact, in the first generation of pieces produced, the artist addressed the withering away of African cultural and moral values ​​in contact with so-called modern society, especially the overexploitation of Nature from which Africa draws all its resources. Assemblies and ropes in memory of this very dark period of Africa, the Slaves trade, translate this. The raw, dark material where the subjects appear in engraved forms, sculpted to express the suffering and the erasure of a civilization.

For his series called  "Human stupidity", he depicted the vulnerability of marginalized children. The issue of malnutrition and famine in certain regions of the world put the youngest in this precarious situation. Using the same materials, he sutures, binds and engraves to convey his message; to heal the wounds of humanity plunged into an infernal cycle of violence.

His recent works that was the subject of the exhibition titled "Resilience", Yapi Roger urges everyone not to be defeated, but to resist. It is a manifesto to the resistance against despair.

“Life does not offer us its best products. It confronts us with harsh realities. Oppression, abuse of power and authority are rife. Would you let yourself be overwhelmed by difficulties or resist? Standing steady in the struggle for survival and better living conditions seems the only alternative for a happy and successful life. By being resilient, we can hope for a better future. As Alexandre David-Neel said: "What to seek and find is the serene sweetness of unshakeable peace".