There is an exhibition in MoMA on Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. Born in 1923 (and died in 2014), Bouabré was from Côte d’Ivoire and he began his career as a civil servant in the French colonial government. When you look at his artwork, you cannot help notice that some of these bureaucratic tendencies, such as documenting everything and putting it in the correct format, stayed with him.

His artwork has a unifying format: pieces of postcard-sized cardboard, featuring a lined frame. Inside the frame, there is a hand-drawn colourful drawing. Outside the frame, there is a written description of the drawing. The drawings themselves resemble children’s sketches. They don’t attempt anything more, and so a cynic might pass this particular exhibition and think to himself “Well, I could have done that”. Along the same lines, they might think that anything you put on a blank white wall and surround with excess blank space constitutes art. In some cases, the cynic would be forgiven because there is some truth in that statement. Despite this, there is still something admirable about Bouabre’s work.

To see it, we have to go back to ancient Egypt. Scattered across the walls of a tomb, you find colourful and slender hieroglyphs and abstract scenes. The purpose of these pictures is symbolic, and an arrangement of these symbols constitute a divine message. They are complete in that they try to map out the scenes in their entirety, drawing every animal, fish, landscape from the perspective that captures them best.

This is the same paradigm Bouabré adopts, albeit a less oppressive and divisive version of it. He sees divine messages in every day things and has no pretence of being specially endowed with his ability to do so. He tries to map out as much as he can, and includes a written caption for the sake of completeness. In a video played in the exhibition, we see how he lives each day. He wakes up, eats a bit and then walks out on the street, picking up whatever may have caught his eye. Mostly trash, orange peels (see “Relevés des signes observés sur oranges”), coffee stained paper, etc. Things, you might scold a child for picking up, saying “its dirty, throw it away!”. It’s his sincerity that is reassuring. In his words, his mission is to survey, calling the endeavour “conaissance du monde” or “knowledge of the world”. It is a humbling mission that says observing is enough. There is no impulse to change things or to state something important about what is observed. You see a pattern in an orange peel and it is enough simply to see it, capture it. Another artist who works under this same assumption, is the photographer William Eggleston whose subject matter was also everyday things: old tires, Dr. Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles, etc. His photographs, like Bouabré’s drawings share the same democratic perspective. They do not privilege the special over the common. Rather, by paying explicit attention to the common, they reveal what is special about them.

There is a lot that has conditioned us to dislike Bouabré’s work and so it is rather surprising that we do, but it is worth sharing his perspective, if only because it is kinder.