Sometimes a few centimetres of wood can masterfully reveal several visual lessons at once. Synthesis and expressiveness are in fact the best that African art has been able to refine over the centuries and to pass down to us today, and it is difficult to find them excellently expressed in a single work of art.
Such is the case with this magnificent BambouToro sculpture in the form of an upright female figure.
A few simple but perfectly arranged volumes, reminiscent of Brancusi's work, make up the body. At the front, two hemispheres, the breasts, perfectly clarify the female gender of the figure.
The invented X-shaped arms, reproposed and contrasted also on the back, resolve in profile in a full parenthesis and suggest a probable original Janiform representation of the sculpture.
The face is then made by carving two semi-circles for eyes that join at the bottom to determine the nose, a line for the mouth and two circles to represent the ears. Very few masterfully arranged strokes create a magnificent synthesis of ingenious plasticity.
The expressiveness lies in the few millimetres of inclination and torsion of the head that produce an intense, almost dramatic effect in a strange mirror game in which the sculpture weighs us, the observers, looking at us from behind...
Superb patina and evident wear with a respectable provenance: work published on page 53 of the catalogue "Mali" published by the Olivier Castellano Gallery in Paris.