Born in 1996, Ballo Oboubé Yannick Brice Emérick, known as Emérick Boby, is a contemporary Beninese visual artist. He lives and works in Ouidah. Fueled by the desire to capture moments of life, empathy, irony, and sometimes satire, Emérick Boby often says that his work draws heavily from humanity, society, and history as foundations for subjectivity and themes.
He began his career in 2015 as a portrait drawer, treating images from reality as an ode to classicism. The Cultural and Artistic Union of Students (UCAE) at the University of Abomey-Calavi (UAC) served as his training ground and a haven where, beyond the style of bile and graphite pencil, he would explore the various possibilities offered by drawing. His desire to create meaningful images inevitably led him to painting and sculpture, fields in which his anthropological and sociological questions haunted him.
“I feed on my environment, my society, what it offers me as a spectacle, the psychological foundations that fix common imaginations, and things that speak of invisibilities. My work process always starts with questions, inquiries oscillating between anthropology and sociology. It often begins with a phrase, then silhouettes, then compositions that give meaning to these silhouettes, and then a story to tell, a gesture to show,” he asserts.
Juvenile silhouettes, accompanied children, female bodies, scarified masks, scepters, and dreamlike backgrounds define Emérick Boby’s visual universe, which deconstructs social balances and addresses the issue of childhood through an anthropological interpretation of human gestures. What have we left to society? What have we done with childhood-future? What have we built, we who are corruptible and corrective beings?
The essence of Emérick Body’s work survives through these questions. Having participated in several collective exhibitions both nationally and internationally, he has won several awards, including the “Create your self-portrait with recycled objects” contest organized by the European Union as part of the “Diplomatic Climate Week 2020 edition.”
Steven Coffi Adjaï
I draw nourishment from my environment, my society, from what it presents as spectacle, the psychological foundations that anchor common imaginations, and the things that speak of invisibilities. My work process always begins with questions, inquiries oscillating between anthropology and sociology. It often starts with a phrase, then silhouettes, then compositions that bring meaning to these silhouettes, and then a story to tell, a gesture to show.
My main focus, which seeks to make visible the issue of unstable childhood, is merely a pretext to depict a certain neglect of the human spirit, one that drives us to reveal our most primal impulses. When I speak of childhood, I link it to the term ‘education’, in an exercise of duality that ties it to what we see in society, and to what we do to society. To say that childhood is the reflection or even the mirror of social constructs is to admit helplessness, perhaps insight; it is to show an odalisque of the antechamber of things to come that I try to see.
Trying to see in my creative process involves questioning images that are not merely objects, but gestures at the dawn of their occurrence: why is this child in that alley, on this cold night where specters prefer to don singular garb? Why is this child the unloved one in the family, often sidelined because they do not fit the norm established by the family framework? Also, ethics and politics in this social setting seem to me the means through which childhood is constructed, moves, and changes.
Therefore, it is not rare to see in my work juvenile bodies revealing themselves to the viewer in settings inspired by African fabrics. This habitat that I create circumstantially contributes to a desire to capture life moments whose essence lies in a question: is the human fundamentally a corruptor to the extent of building a corruptible society ?
Emérick Boby