20 000 lieues sous les mers

From 6 March to 31 May 2025, Galerie Nathan Chiche presents 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea: the voyage of Barthélémy Toguo, an exhibition devoted to the work of the Cameroonian artist. In this setting of metal and glass designed by Jean Prouvé, like a vessel run aground at the edge of sky and sea, Barthélémy Toguo unfolds his pulsing universe, where every work resonates as a vibration of the living. This building, rigorous and modular, embodies the oneiric contours of a buried submersible, and in the glint of its metal walls an abyssal blue is reflected. In this dialogue between architecture and art it is impossible not to feel the double nature of the sea, described so exactly by Victor Hugo: “The sea is a space of rigour and of freedom.”

This ambivalence of the sea, at once rigorous space and refuge, finds a poignant resonance in the monumental installation Road to Exile. It imposes itself as a topography of hopes and crossings, in which the sea becomes both witness and actor of contemporary migrations. This is no longer the heroic ocean of Verne's tales, but a sea heavy with human histories, run through with pain and waiting. Barthélémy Toguo grasps these histories with gravity, making of the ocean not only a setting but a witness to hopes and to ordeals.

The sea, in all its immensity and its contradictions, runs through this exhibition as a central figure, at once matrix and theatre. Jules Verne expresses it with visionary power in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: “Yes! I love it! The sea is everything!” This blue, like the living infinite Verne evokes, becomes in Barthélémy Toguo a vibrant matter, a breath that binds the works and transcends the spaces.

Toguo blue, omnipresent in the exhibition, acts as a living matter, a perpetual breath that crosses and binds the works. Now spread in deep sheets, now dispersed in light volutes, it evokes the immemorial oscillations of the deep. At once anchorage and escape, this blue embodies a fascinating duality: engulfment and revelation, silence and movement.

If the Chroniques du Vivant jars stand like timeless relics, witnesses to a dialogue between earth and sea, the bronze fish of the Fish in Nature series plunge into a mythological temporality. The motifs on the jars, a fish embracing an amphora, or submerged bunches of grapes, symbolise a fertile union in which nature contemplates and regenerates itself. Barthélémy Toguo illuminates their meaning in these terms: “The images I have made on these amphorae are similar to what I try to share with the world. Everything is connected. We are in a nature-human system that regulates itself. One needs the other, and vice versa.” The bronze fish, for their part, seem to surge out of a temporal hiatus, like artefacts exhumed from an engulfed civilisation. Their scales, chased with an almost organic minuteness, catch the light with an almost aquatic subtlety. Their patina, oscillating between azure and verdigris, bears witness to a suspended time, as if these creatures had absorbed the centuries passed beneath the sea.

Extending this, the series of glazed ceramics Balade Aquatique explores marine forms. Four of them depict an octopus whose sinuous, almost hypnotic tentacles seem to converse with the imaginary of Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The lustrous surfaces of the ceramics capture light with the same fineness as wet skin emerging from water, giving these works a tactile vitality. Arranged facing Jean Prouvé's portholes, they seem to float in an in-between where inside and outside mingle, and where every reflection seems to murmur the echoes of an underwater world.

In this exhibition, Jean Prouvé's building transcends its role as container to become a “contemporary Nautilus”, a sounding box in which Barthélémy Toguo's works come to life. Its metal lines, rigorous and timeless, contrast with the organic fluidity of the ceramics and the paintings, but this antagonism creates a fertile dialogue, a reflection on the links between the human being and his environment, between structure and life. Barthélémy Toguo is a ferryman, a navigator of souls and of narratives. His works invite a dive, not only into the marine universe but also into the deeper waters of our collective unconscious. The blue that runs through his work is not only an evocation of the ocean: it is an oneiric matter, a space in which dream, memory and spiritual awakening converge.

— Nathan Chiche