Storytelling is Didier Viodé's second solo show at Foreign Agent. In Storytelling, the artist continues his observation of human life through a series of portraits and landscapes, which tell stories from his own personal memories as a child in the Ivory Coast to contemporary culture and society. At the heart of his work lies the human being, captured and framed as a photograph. Viodé often works from pictures, selfies or Instagram, always looking at the world through a lens. In the process of framing, the artist looks at his subjects from the front but also from the back or sideways. A kind of stalking which seeks to show and reveal what lies below the surface.
In Storytelling, the narrative of his subjects is kept to a bare minimum: fashionable accessories, sunglasses, baseball caps, black, colorful or patterned clothes which anchor the portraits in a banal contemporary urban setting which could be anywhere in the world. Everyone in those portraits seems somehow familiar, maybe because the artist has erased all specifics, blurred or eliminated everything unnecessary to the storytelling of the figure. Storytelling is about who we all are, as human beings in the world.
