Page 128

T80E

GEORGES MEURANT - African Collections and Studies 126 FIG. 1 (above): Georges Meurant in front of part of one of his murals in Brussels. Photo: Thierry Henrard, 2015. FIG. 2 (right): “Velour.” Shoowa, Kasaï, DR Congo. Before 1970. The next year, while visiting the Cairo Museum, I was able to visit its storage and see cases fi lled with piles of small, archaic tribal sculptures, cracked and crazed so fi nely that their trunks absorbed light like dark velvet. I began to think about Sub-Saharan Africa, an artproducing area I had never really considered before. Henrion introduced me to the most important players on the Brussels tribal art scene at the time, most notably Willy Mestach, Pierre Dartevelle, Marc Leo Felix, Philippe Guimiot, and Martial Bronsin. I bought half-abstract/ half-expressionistic Ubangi sculptures, which at the time were nascent, a situation I found I responded well to. I also acquired works from other cultures that moved me. I drew, engraved, and painted representations for a quarter of a century, but my own work seemed to me to have little intensity compared to the embroidered and sculpted objects I had gathered in my studio. I began experimenting with an abstract style rooted in color. I fi rst rejected curves and then oblique lines and wound up juxtaposing brightly colored monochromatic rectangles. I haven’t yet tired of this exploration. Pierre Thoma: You collect works of tribal art, and your studies on the geometric designs of the Shoowa of the Kasaï and the Mbuti of the Ituri rainforest, as well as of Tanzanian and Ubangi sculpture, are well known and have been widely disseminated.* You have been a teacher and you create colorful geometric paintings that are in private collections and also adorn major public buildings. How are these many facets of your activities related? Georges Meurant: When I was fourteen, I was struggling with a strict Greco-Latin curriculum, and my father enrolled me in evening courses in art school to offer me some distraction. I began painting the following year, and I was an art instructor by the time I was twenty-one. In 1977, while visiting Joseph Henrion, a sculptor and collector of Kongo art, I saw two Shoowa embroideries and was fascinated by their power. I was driven to comprehend their geometric designs, and I would subsequently see twelve thousand of them and own several hundred. Interview by Pierre Thoma TRIBAL people


T80E
To see the actual publication please follow the link above