Caterina Grimaldi

Pefura and the plural: If You Can’t Swim, Monsuperkilomètre, San Vittore and the others

Establish the truth, define reality and impose your own view: the combined prerogative of the victors.

On 5 May 2018, those who attended the opening of Monsuperkilomètre, on Rue de la Gueule Tapée (Dakar), didn’t fully understand what was expected of them. You could see it in their eyes. What was there to see? What was that exhibition, that event, that day all about?

And it is from that bewilderment that the path delineating the ‘artistic focus’ of Maurice Pefura can be traced.

Maurice Pefura lives completely immersed in his art, prioritising it above all else, even sleeping and eating. That may seem over the top, but it is true. He can spend hours taking photographs, making notes and sketches, and days or weeks incessantly painting, fasting, to then eat a whole roast chicken, take a nap and start all over again. Non-stop work becomes a sort of meditation; control over one’s being and even the reclaiming of independence against the relentless pace of society.

Born in Paris and raised between Paris and Western Cameroon, his approach to life is based on a to-ing-and-fro-ing between the extremes of both cultures, instead of settling at an intermediary point between the two.

The themes that he goes back to time and again in his art relate to the body and physical and interior spaces. Inside and out, full and empty, freedom and connection.

Let’s start with the format. Pefura’s work does not seem to be constrained by any kind of dimension, given that he has made both post-it-note-sized paintings and truly enormous installations.

Each creation, however big or small, represents a slice of a creative journey underway; an element that forms part of a single piece, coherent, whole and yet unfinished.

In terms of media, perhaps the most recognisable are the façades of large urban buildings. These reflect the fragility of existence itself, the repetitive nature of gestures and canons (those perceptible to a greater or lesser extent) which govern our lives and which although help to protect our bodies, also limit them by becoming something that is so far removed from the original objectives of their conception: as a refuge, to heal and flourish. These façades leave out realism to show alternating fullness and emptiness, black and white, openings and closures. Pairs of opposites which, together, reveal the mystery of freedom from a radical perspective. How have we managed to create a settlement that, perhaps despite themselves, are so close to the prisons that humanity constructs for itself?

Other works of his revolve around nature. Open and empty spaces, virgin landscapes in which you can make out primary elements, subtle traces, lines that start to break up the space into sections, damage it and timestamp it to show the passing of time and other unavoidable measures.
However, manipulating the landscape and its fractions responds to the need of tackling reality, bending it and expressing your own perspective.

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Monsuperkilomètreis a symbol: a blue line traced on top of the city, running through its heart and outlining a makeshift market located at a busy outside spot in a populated area. On an urban scale, this line stands for the gesture that gives rise to writing, design and measurement.

Tracing a symbol represents the intention of expressing a meaning or the existence of something that you want to say or communicate.

However, within the freedom allowed by this gesture, Pefura and Dahan (the duo known as Atelier UY077) invite other people to express themselves, show and present that which they desire or possess, even unexpectedly and without constraints.

Thus, Monsuperkilomètre becomes the mirror in which reality (that outlying problematic street in the city we find ourselves in) finds a space where it can be represented.

This is an extremely conceptual work of art related to the essence of writing, freedom and expression of the senses that allows for aggregation, inside and out, of work, the presence, organisms and different objects: naïve sculptures, crafted pieces, photographs, tyre sellers, toy stalls, telephones and secondhand clothes, foundations, singers, a cinema and much more. In other words, in this case work and reality go hand in hand.

The reality of the world is a choral element. By tracing the kilometric line, this chorality finds a way of being written down and read and, at the same time, allows us to learn of the exact moment in which the superficial and amused gaze of the spectators finally understands. As such, we can sense the ‘clicks’ of the observer’s mental cogs turning.

In some ways, Monsuperkilomètre is a novel media, and we could even say that that it is an alternative way of conceiving art and taking artistic objects beyond its usual confines.

In this project the artist comes off the pedestal they may have been placed on by human fragility or the market (by needing to have someone whose greater knowledge shows us the way or to act out a victor’s leadership role) to mix with everyone else and together enjoy the spectacle that this display represents of the world that we live in.

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2013, Milán, five years previously.
If You Can’t Swim, the first of Pefura’s monumentally-sized installations, represents the façades of two palaces on the outskirts. It is composed of around 450 pieces of 60×50-cm paper decorated with the techniques that the artist usually employs in his pictures: acrylic, tar, and paper pliage and collage.

It is an evolutive and adaptive piece. The arrangement presented in Frigoriferi Milanesi comprises two 3.5-metre-high blocks that are 45 metres long in total (22.5 metres each), which altogether make up around 150 m2 of painting.

So what is If You Can’t Swim? It is a huge piece, that’s true, but it’s made out of paper. It covers an immense surface, but it can be broken down, folded and even stowed away in a suitcase. This combination of strength and fragility is the main concept around which the piece has evolved, which talks about humans without needing to show them. It is conceived as a skin.

The aromatic and textual elements of the piece allow it to work as a performance in which the repetition of gestures employed during its making shows at first glance the fragility and delicacy of our lives, marked by daily actions and ordinary documents: shop receipts, mineral water labels, public transport tickets, cinema stubs, sheets of newspaper, lottery tickets, and many more.

Despite working alone on If You Can’t Swim, Pefura speaks tirelessly for us all, highlighting the precarity of so many existences which are carried along, so to speak, like butterflies at the edge of a tornado.

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The third stage of the visit takes us back again to Milan, this time in 2024. We find ourselves in San Vittore prison, the oldest in the city, located in the centre of the city and built as a panopticon, the concept and implications of which were explained extensively by Foucault.

Milan’s Polytechnic University and Contemporary Art Pavillion decided to reform the partially buried gallery of the Primo Raggio to create a space dedicated to contemporary art that serves as a point of connection and exchange between the prison and the city.

For several months, Pefura led a workshop for inmates aimed at creating a large piece that was adaptable in situ: Gli artisti sono quelli che fanno casino. On this occasion, the dimensions of the piece are also impressive, spanning 100 metres in length (50 metres each side) and two metres in height. The techniques are the same as always: acrylic, and paper pliage and collage of pieces that measure 65×50 cm.

This piece, impressive in its poetic significance, could be associated with concepts like ‘permeability’ and ‘overturning’. From the entrance right through to the end of the gallery, the surface of the palaces transforms. At the entrance you can see a clean and tidy façade which progressively takes on the burden of a human presence, first through ‘external’ objects and documents (receipts, newspapers and labels, etc.), then in human silhouettes and lastly through thoughts and images written or drawn on post-it-notes during the workshop. As the piece continues, the wall seems to disintegrate to leave space for the inwardness of the messages. Once again, the constraints of the piece have been tested and pulled down.

Permeability and overturning the inside and the outside (internal and physical space, what is individual or collective, the human body vs. the social body, city and prison or city and artwork) manage to make the human pietas flourish. As is obvious, in this context any distinction between inmates, artists, guards, teachers, nurses, curators, psychologists, lawyers, visitors and guests disappears.

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1999-2019. The relationships between subject and object, inside and out and fullness and emptiness characterised by Pefura’s art and expressed through a pattern of squares similar to a chessboard, go back a long way. Together with the willingness to test the limits of painting as an instrument of expression to find a personal and contemporary approach, these connections already represented a major part of his work, ever since the artist first tested the relationship between the painting and its framework many years ago.
The exercise was recovered for the piece that makes up the last stage of our visit: La Pente, l’Horizon, et le Nous, curated by Simon Mjami at the Galerie MAM in Douala in 2019, in a piece created with Bili Bidjoka.

On this occasion, the aim is to open up a debate on the perception and notion of the authors (that formed a duo known as BBMP) by creating pieces with both hands and showing the individualism of “I” as an uncomfortable, artificial and problematic creation. They modified the floor of the gallery, transforming it into a slope that was not dangerous, but definitely awkward.

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“All that which leads to the ego and the individual forces us up against the wall, firstly because it leads us to believe that we cannot do anything alone, and that it is not true. There is the possibility of finding new ways out to build again. Despite what we may think, people do have the strength inside of themselves to get up, rebuild, repair, take control of their destiny and do what they want to even in the most difficult of situations.” The nous or us that forms part of the title of Douala’s work refers to two artists, maybe to Cameroon, maybe to Africa as well, why not, even to all people.

As they say, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Japan can impact the shape or the course of a tornado created in Texas weeks later.
The poetic component is really powerful, as it represents the way in which slight and distant elements are involved in how reality manifests itself.

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The last thing I saw in Milan airport in May 2018 before boarding a plane to Dakar was a news report which said that Salvini, the political leader of the Liga party, had formed a new government with the Five Star Movement. At that point, I felt truly fearful: the opposite of everything I love about humanity had taken over and imposed its world vision.

The following day, already in Dakar by then, I thought again about that sensation while I was walking up and down the ‘superkilometre’ and I was relieved to discover, from that perspective, that Salvini and his party were completely irrelevant. Luckily, the planet is still a huge place. Nevertheless, to satisfy the needs of freedom of intelligence and spirit, it is essential that ‘the other side’ keeps existing. That which is still there to discover, to know and to explore. Art and other people are examples of places that we can find on ‘the other side’. In other words, they are the Japan to our Texas.

The observer

I consider myself to own a gaze that explores, examines, deconstructs and reconstructs to understand my surroundings. For me, painting and drawing is what walking or breathing are to others. How can you understand the world without being fully conscious? How can you know something without having first outlined it? Painting is getting a pulse on your context and establishing a relationship with the time that each of us needs to observe, deconstruct, reconstruct and trace a reality in constant flux.

Painting represented a way of dialoguing with objects, landscapes and faces that could not exist outside of this prism or type of translation that all at once, seem intelligible to me. The distance required to observe creates a saving frontality and seems essential for better understanding the object observed overall.

It was while I was painting that I confronted space and its complex relationship with the body, which I continued until I got to the limit between two realities: the inside, from which we feel, and the outside, of which we form part. Architecture was the perfect discipline to experiment with this dichotomy.

All of my work revolves around the dynamic of bringing together mental and physical spaces, seemingly at first incompatible, in a constant quest that represents the main thread of my reflection.

Maurice Pefura