Afi Nayo: Suites of Love

Press Release

Afi Nayo

Suites of Love

September 6th – October 13th, 2007

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of mixed media works by the Togolese-born artist Afi Nayo. This will be her first New York solo show. The reception is on Thursday, September 6th, 5-8pm and the artist will be present.

Afi Nayo’s work is intensely personal and displays a blend of fragility, modesty and refinement. She uses the pyrogravure and mixed media technique on wooden board to create pictures that consist of fantastic dream images, wit and imagination as well as overtones of fantasy and satire. They are dense with sensual surfaces, formal rigors and color harmonies that demonstrate a playful openness to art historical influences while simultaneously encouraging multiple layers of meanings. She uses a complex language of symbols and signs drawn from the unconscious to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality, revealing a reality behind the visible things around us -expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many other latent realities.

Like a number of contemporary artists of her generation who are interested in exploring the diversified spaces between the self and society, Afi Nayo works both from within tradition and as an outsider. Her work demonstrates an abiding confidence that visual images can still communicate powerful emotional and spiritual values, in addition to formal aesthetic quality. The implications within her work are complex and require careful examination; and the viewer who is willing to invest time and effort, is often richly rewarded as embedded secrets unlock themselves loose from beneath the textured surfaces, thought and emotion form a whole, out of which grows a myth of universal validity.

Afi Nayo was born 1969 in Lome, Togo, West Africa and moved to Paris, France with her family at an early age, where she presently lives and works. After briefly attending the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she began an active studio practice. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Africa and Europe, including The French Cultural Centre, Lome, Togo; Galerie Vivienne, Paris, Galerie Nathalie Duchayne, Saint Tropez, France and Art Home in Belgium. She is also represented in several public and private collections