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Hervé Yamguen

Se Sauver, 2023

Courtesy of the artist

Collection

Hervé Yamguen

Se Sauver, 2023

Acrylic on paper

65 x 50 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Se Sauver—translated as “Saving Oneself” or “To Save Oneself”—is a luminous and intimate work in which Hervé Yamguen explores the fragile, necessary act of inner rescue. Created in 2023, this drawing belongs to a cycle of works where the artist engages with the emotional and spiritual labor of survival—survival not just in a material sense, but in a psychic and poetic one. Rendered in vibrant, contrasting tones and intricate lines, Se Sauver depicts a figure in transformation, suspended between states of being. The figure appears both exposed and protected, caught in a web of organic, symbolic forms: eyes that watch over, stars that guide, and vegetal patterns that seem to root the body to unseen sources of strength. As with much of Yamguen’s work, the border between the self and the world is porous. The body becomes a landscape, the face a field of meaning.

Rather than dramatizing escape or crisis, the drawing suggests a quiet, persistent act of care. To save oneself, in Yamguen’s vision, is not to flee but to return—to reenter the interior world with gentleness, to reconnect with one’s own sources of life: memory, nature, intuition, and ancestral presence.

Se Sauver resonates with the artist’s larger practice of visual poetry, where drawing becomes a form of writing, and the image becomes a vessel for the unspeakable. It is a declaration of resilience made not with force, but with grace—a testament to the healing power of imagination.

Related works in the collection

Hervé Yamguen Se Sauver, 2023

Hervé Yamguen L'arrière pays mental, 2023

Hervé Yamguen Histoire de têtes 3, 2018

Hervé Yamguen Prendre soin, 2023

Artists

Hervé Yamguen