
Helene Love-Allotey
Head of Department
US$9,000 - US$14,000
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Provenance
The collection of the artist's family.
While he became a legendary character, Cheik Nadro, "the one who does not forget", the Ivory Coast artist invented a universal language with an alphabet that brought him the reputation of "new Champollion". Made up of 440 monosyllabic pictograms, it constitutes the graphic representation of its vernacular language, the one of the Betes, also able to reproduce all the speech sounds of every spoken language : "The alphabet is the indisputable pillar of the human language. It is the crucible where the memory of the man lives. It is a remedy against oblivion, dreadful factor of ignorance." Translating sounds was not enough : it was also necessary to capture what he saw.