JAVIER PERES 125 advantage for you in acquiring works this way? J. P.: I buy from different sources, including dealers, auctions, and other collectors. What’s most important to me are the objects themselves. Lately I’ve been focusing on works from Nigeria, and these sculptures come to me from varied sources. However, some of the more established and well-known dealers in Paris and Brussels have helped me acquire incredible sculptures that have really enriched my collection. Provenance is an important factor but one that follows the initial and critical aesthetic pull an object has on me. Being a history nerd, I love it when an object not only is incredible for me to look at but also when I know that it was handled and experienced by historic fi gures who are important to the fi eld. Take, for example, my Teke sculpture. This powerful fi gure, which still has its magical charge, came through the hands of some very important men—Stephen Chauvet, Pierre Vérité, and Alain de Monbrison—and it was included in the groundbreaking 1935 MOMA exhibition, African Negro Art, where it was seen by an American audience that was experiencing African art for the fi rst time. This sort of history of an object adds another layer of enjoyment that is important for me. Objects such as this tend to be well known and are most often found with high-end dealers and auctions. T. A. M.: Over the years you’ve enlisted some skilled help in building your collection. How did you form those relationships and how do they function? J. P.: Collecting in this fi eld can open the doors to a great education. It’s been like learning another language, one that I have to constantly keep adding vocabulary to in order to be able to communicate. When I started collecting fi fteen years ago, I met Guy Van Rijn in Brussels and he was really helpful in sharing his knowledge and information. I met Bruno Claessens a couple of years ago through Guy and we immediately started to work together. This relationship has really been at the core of my current collecting, allowing me to dive deeper and deeper into the fi eld. As I said, aesthetics are always the starting point when I approach an object, but since I come from an academic background I also enjoy the learning process behind an object. Aesthetically speaking, classical African art is for me one of the pinnacles of art production, but having access to the history of an object —why it was created, who it was created by, and for whose use—has allowed me to learn things about the art that I couldn’t have imagined. It broadens my intellectual understanding considerably, and now with Bruno’s guidance I’m more receptive to new ideas and forms than I ever could have FIGS. 10a & b: Altar. Kaka, Mbem region, Western Cameroon. Ex El Hadji Amadou Yende; Karl Ferdinand Schaedler, early 1970s–1985; James Willis, San Francisco, 1985; Helen and Robert Kuhn, Los Angeles, 1985–1991; William Ziff, New York, 1991–2014; Entwistle Gallery, Paris, September 2014. Wood, sacrifi cial patina. H: 124.5 cm. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
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