Fabrice Beuillé alias Ainaut
Early works
TOUTENKALBAS
Toutenkalbas — the Africa years
At sixteen I left school and France for West Africa. I travelled through several countries in the region and spent five years in Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso, working alongside craftsmen and learning from their hands respect for the material and patience in the gesture.
That is where my calabash works were born. I opened it, assembled it, engraved it, married it to leather, bogolan and cowries, drawing from it furniture, masks, sculptures — unique pieces that can be handled, opened, switched on. The same obsession was already at work in the material: the geometry of grids and chequerboards, the rhythm of aligned cowries, light trapped behind an openwork wall.
Without naming it, I was laying the foundations of my work today. Abstract geometry and programmed light came much later, under the name Ainaut — not as a break, but as the distillation of those first gestures.
Toutenkalbas brings together these early works (1998–2006).
Fabrice Beuillé alias Fabrice Ainaut
Born in 1982 in Tarbes.
Lives and works in Savigny-sur-Orge.
Fabrice Beuillé alias Fabrice Ainaut
Galerie Artitude, Paris 2005
Toutenkalbas — a sign of the times
As have been, since the earliest ages, the utensils drawn from earth and vegetation, then decorated for daily life, leisure, combat and ritual — objects bound intensely and movingly to the history of humankind — Fabrice Beuillé makes calabash objects that are at once useful and decorative. Furniture for the most part, but not only: witness the N'Goni, a musical instrument of calabash and goatskin strung with nylon.
Hollowed and dried, the calabash has long served as vessel and resonator. Its voice is singular: in the balafons of Africa the sound is blurred. Against the deliberate clarity of Western instruments, the muted tones of African instruments seek to signify the complexity of the world, in the image of the human voice. Which is to say that the calabash, useful or pleasing, is a precious element of what binds the human to nature and to culture — and Fabrice Beuillé is to be thanked for thinking to bring it forward in our world, forgetful of its roots.
Fabrice's objects meet the questions of our time: respect for the planet and an ethical relation to it, but also the invention and playfulness dear to Madi, and that universalism which leads him, consciously or not, to bring together the aesthetic vocabularies of every civilisation. In our fragmented age he knows how to reconnect different spaces and different times, while recalling, through their texture and their origin, that these objects belong to the rainforest and hold the status of "fruit".
Fabrice Beuillé, through a talent made of poetry, care, technique, intuition, intelligence and tenderness, brings magical objects to our civilisation. I wish his work long life.
France Delville, 2006