Galerie anne barrault is delighted to present Ibrahim Meïté Sikely’s very first solo show.
Born in 1996, Ibrahim Meité Sikely received his MFA from the Villa Arson in 2022, and will be a graduate from the Beaux-Arts de Paris at the time of the exhibition.
He will present a new body of work in which power relations are replayed and subverted. By staging scenes with his loved ones, using a combination of fiction and realism, he creates personal fables that allow him to question social determinism.
“WE’RE GONNA SHOCK THEM” is the last sentence of the last voicemail Ibrahim sent me.
When we were a bit younger, he often liked to talk about brightness when referring to the people who inspired him and whom he ended up painting.
Knowing him and observing the way he used the term, I understood that he wasn’t using it, as often, to acclaim an individual’s eloquence and academic prowess, but literally as if referring to the colorful, luminous reflections found in nature.
In them, he was able to see their colors, their shimmer, their glints, he caught their luminous auras without them needing to be in their best light, without their masks, without anyone else having to put a magnifying glass in front of his eyes, without any invitation or authorization.
Some time later, tired of the expectations of “excellence” placed on the famous immigrant children, not identifying himself with the speeches, portraits, photo albums-i*stagr*m of apparently model families and children who surrounded us, for fear of not being understood, Ibrahim began to reject the word brightness as much as he rejected the word “excellence”.
He told me “I want to make turbulent paintings!!!” and so he did.
It was hard to see Ibrahim this year, as he was too busy paying homage to dunces with large brushstrokes, because yes, turbulence is the precise word used in school reports about them and those looked at askance. Boisterous golden-browns, teeming layers of oil, tender, melancholy iridescent pinks, cosmic reds, hyperactive in all genres and horizons.
His compositions, his colors, his style, his characters reflected this promise of turbulence. But for his whirlwind speed, only his working rhythm was too regular (if not relentless) to be qualified by this word.
It was this relentlessness he immersed himself in to heal his pain, and I think he hopes that it will heal yours a little too.
An unruly child has always been the one to whom the right to be loved unconditionally (among other rights…) is most readily taken away. He or she is often also the one who tries to raise his or her average school marks by a few points thanks to art classes.
As a child, the only poem I enjoyed learning was Jacques Prévert’s Le Cancre, published in 1945,
I’ll let you look it up on the Internet or in a hopefully crumpled notebook, and rather than recite it for you, I have a few hypotheses (which are not hypotheses)
And what if, THROUGH HIS DISOBEDIENCE, they were God’s favorite child?! Not waiting for permission to carry out his or her mission.
In a world where any unpredictability is considered madness, liable to be judged, apprehended, annihilated, a world where the fearful want to control us, to locate us, What if in this world, turbulence was our salvation?!
What if they were the one who, rid of expectations and shame, could give free rein to his or her creative whirlwind and let the cosmos express itself through them?
And what if they were the one that meant making a racket in the galaxy, interstellar loudspeaker included? May the racist neighbor adapt or shut up forever.
Today, as an adult, I can tell you that being a helpful child did not help me. I love and respect the turbulent child more than anything else, because while others like me were crumbling inside to survive, the turbulent child was trying as best as he could to topple the big boot that was trying to trample them, because they knew in their heart that this boot was not right.
In any case, as they say,
I’ve got a question for you,
And to quote my dear friend,
you’re a nice guy,
But …… DO YOU KNOW A FOULEK? *
I do, and I invite you to do the same and be one yourself (if you don’t want to waste your life).
Neïla Czermak Ichti
August 2025
*Inspired by north African-Arabic language, Foulek is a french slang word used to describe someone deemed “crazy”, whose behavior can be considered carefree/careless, extravagant, and atypical, with some sort of chaotic swagger to them. There is a sense of pride and insubordination in that so called madness. Some say it might be the contraction of “fou” (crazy in french), and “belek” north African Arabic and french slang word to tell someone : “be careful”.
Foulek has also been popularized through french rap music, and notoriously by rappers such as Rohff, [whom first self made label created in 2001 was called “Foolek Empire” (The anglicization reminding of the words Fool and it’s abreviation “foo” often used and popularized by Mexican and Black people from southern California).]
In an earlier painting (that won’t be part of this exhibition), Rohff had already been depicted by artist Ibrahim Meité Sikely, as a Titan frowning upon the latter’s reminiscence of the police brutalizing a group of teenage boys, the scene taking place in the painter’s neighborhood of the labeled « 94» french department, from which both painter & rapper come from. His titanic posture both inspired by Goya’s painting “El Colosso” (“The Colossus”) made around 1808, and by the cover art of Rohff’s album “la fierté des nôtres” (“The pride of our people”) released in 2004, where in a surrealist photomontage, the rapper appears as a giant sitting on one of the most famous monuments in Paris the “Arc de Triomphe”.
With support for galleries of the Centre national des arts plastiques 
Ibrahim Meïté Sikely in his studio at Villa Belleville
photo Younes Lagrouni, 2025