Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: The Knowledge of the World

February 20 – March 28, 2009
The drawings of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (b. 1923, Ivory Coast) lie somewhere between the mystical griot traditions of Africa and the diaristic, self-reflective, and archival traditions of the Western world. From 1958 onward, Bouabré kept journals and created drawings that helped him organize the relationships between the spiritual, physical, and linguistic worlds he experienced. In the 1970s, he began to produce postcard-sized drawings on cardboard with ball point pen and colored pencils, entitled The Knowledge of the World, which explored an encyclopedic variety of themes including mathematics, African history, linguistics, advertising, sex, religion, and world politics. This exhibition will present over 200 works on paper never before seen in the U.S. Co-curated by Brett Littman and André Magnin.

Above: Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, From the series “Signes relevés sur noix de cola,” 2007. Colored pencil and ballpoint pen on cardboard, 5 3/8 x 7 1/2 inches. Courtesy C.A.A.C. The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva.

©The Drawing Center

L'ALPHABET DE BRULY BOUABRE

Born c. 1923, Zéprégüé, Côte d’Ivoire

Lives and works in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

The origin of all of Frédérick Bruly Bouabré’s work stems from a revelatory experience: on March 11, 1948, “the heavens opened up before my eyes and seven colorful suns described a circle of beauty around their Mother-Sun, I became Cheik Nadro: ‘He who does not forget.’” From then on he tackled every field of knowledge and collected his research in manuscripts about arts and traditions, poetry, tales, religion, esthetics, and philosophy, revealing himself to be an astonishing thinker, poet, encyclopedist, creator. Searching for a way to preserve and transmit the knowledge of the Bété people, as well as the knowledge of the entire world, he invented an alphabet of 448 monosyllabic pictograms to represent phonetic syllables. This endeavor earned Bouabré the legendary reputation of being another Champollion, in reference to the great scholar and linguist Jean-Paul Champollion (1790-1832), who discovered the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs. Bouabré’s alphabet, which can transcribe all human sounds, reflects the essence of his thought: to achieve universality and to unite mankind.(CAACART)