At the heart of the exhibition is a screen print of a mask from the Dan culture, presented in serial repetition, yet subtly different in each sheet. Printed on colored papers, each portrait is subsequently reworked individually by Obou Gbais. The result is a body of works that oscillates between reproduction and uniqueness.

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The serial structure recalls the strategies of Pop Art, particularly those associated with Andy Warhol: repetition as a visual method, variation as an aesthetic principle, and the icon as a pictorial form. Yet while Pop Art engaged with the mechanisms of mass culture and the circulation of images, Obou Gbais shifts the perspective. In his work, repetition does not neutralize the image; it reactivates it. Each variation becomes a gesture of appropriation, each intervention an act of reanimating the motif.

 

Traditionally carrying spiritual and social significance, the Dan mask is here neither presented as an ethnographic object nor fixed within a museum context. Instead, it becomes a contemporary pictorial motif, repositioned within a space of tension between ritual, history, and global visual culture. Through color, intervention, and individualization, the mask transforms: from an anonymous object into a multiple presence.

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The unframed presentation emphasizes the materiality of the works and their processual character. The paper, pigments, and traces of printing remain visible, while the series unfolds in space like a visual field. The coexistence of similarity and difference opens a dialogue on identity and repetition, on the original and the edition, on aura and reproducibility.

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Pop Mask does not assemble identical images but rather a community of variations. Each sheet asserts its autonomy while remaining part of a larger whole. From this tension emerges a contemporary reflection on the image as cultural memory and as a site of continuous reinvention.