This pictorial journal is therefore more than a tribute it is a cry against erasure an act of living memory.
With The Journal of Nanyé Adonon Achille Adonon does not simply paint canvases he excavates. He digs through the opaque layers of history unspoken truths and silences to bring forth a name that of Nanyé Adonon a royal woman a forgotten mother a resisting specter.
Nanyé a young girl given in marriage became the companion of Prince Aho the future King Houegbadja of the Kingdom of Danxome. Despite court intrigues she rose to the status of queen mother yet her memory was buried like that of so many other women whose traces history has tried to erase. Through a fragmented and poetic narrative Achille Adonon refuses this collective amnesia. He transforms silence into material blur into truth and the specter into an essential presence.
The works presented in this exhibition Le temps n. 1, La muse n. 3, Prete moi ta sante, appear as visions suspended between light and darkness. Forms emerge almost by intrusion as if resisting disappearance. Adonon journal is above all a stance against amnesia. It speaks of specters of feminine memory and of a deeply poetic reading of the history of our contemporary societies. It is also a conceptual position grounded in Achille creative process which always begins with a self individual or collective in order to approach a multiple we. Nanyé Adonon was one of the forgotten women in his family history. After the death of this queen the vaults of history worked to bury her without leaving any chance for her name to remain in collective memory. It was almost a kind of memorial damnation. Yet the necessity for a specter to be timeless allowed her name to return under painful circumstances as if to echo what Aby Warburg once wrote it took a great deal of sorrow to see the rebirth of ancient Greece.
This pictorial journal is therefore more than a tribute it is a cry against erasure an act of living memory.
Astride Yaoba
