Translation from the French: Within the most remote parts of Ethiopia, centuries from modernity, Hans Sylvester photographed for six years tribes where men, women, children and elders are true geniuses of ancestral art.
At their feet the Omo River, across a triangle of Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya, the grand Rift Valley [our human homeland] is slowly separating Africa. It is a volcanic region providing an immense palette of pigments, ocher-red, white kaolin, copper-green, luminous yellow and ash-grey.
They are painting geniuses, and their six feet tall bodies are an immense canvas. The strength of their art can be defined in three words: their fingers, speed, and freedom. They draw with their open hands, their nails and fingertips, sometimes with a wooden stick, a reed, a smashed stalk. They draw with swift, rapid and spontaneous gestures beyond childlikeness, these essential movements that great contemporary masters are looking for when they have learned a lot and are trying to forget it all.
