" PAUVRES HOMMES " series

Pascale Marthine Tayou (born in 1967 in Cameroon) is difficult to categorize. He gave himself two first names Pascale and Marthine that he feminized. He studied law, hoping it would lead to a kind of purity, but fled the profession when he realized that the system was corrupt. He then turned to art, despite his suspicision that “it didn’t exist”. Tayou’s work is based on the premise that art cannot be separated from life. His site-specific installations recycle every kind of material, object, and image to testify to the continuous circulation of people throughout the world, their personal history and their culture. He refers to these projects as “collective works,” the result of that which he notices, of what happens to him in everyday life, a sum total of journeys, encounters, energy, chance and spontaneity.
Tayou has commented, “I leave to others the possibility of saying it all. For me, art is just a simple vector of communication.”

In the mid 1990s, much of Tayou’s work was based on drawing. In 1995 he created an extended series of sketches, beginning with a sequence based on Das Kapital. Using chalks, coloured felt tip pens, ink and ballpoint pens on the back of recycled posters, Tayou executed these works very rapidly, in freehand, almost mechanically. Without ever stopping, thinking, or looking back, Tayou could only see the whole once he had finished. Even though they seem formless and out of control, viewed together they are like a series of interconnected dynamic networks that have been infiltrated by a form of energy which seeks to dismantle them. As Tayou has stated, “When I was young, I wrote and I drew. It was my way of rebelling.”
More recently he has used a similar method to create site-specific works and video installations. The words and the rhythm of his texts, the recycled objects that he literally nails on to frames and strews around exhibition spaces, the incidental and purposeful footage picked up by his video camera, regard with equal intensity both the evil and grace of the world we share.