Signes

Following a heavenly vision vouchsafed in 1948, the thinker, poet and draughtsman Frédéric Bruly Bouabré produced a body of work intended to embody all the knowledge in the world. Inventor of an alphabet of 442 monosyllabic pictograms based on his own Bété language, he composed a universal encyclopaedia in images drawn in ball-point and crayon on small sheets of cardboard. Mixing signs proper to his own culture, universal symbols and short descriptive texts, he composed a kaleidoscopic vision of living being organised through categories both poetic and spiritual, such as “Scarifications”, “Myths and Symbols” and so on.