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In his works Victor Fotso Nyie reveals a strong link with his origins, while at the same time underscoring the need for a peaceful dialogue with the cultural identities of others. He combines the styles of his native country (Cameroon) with Western styles (the Italian ceramic technique he learned after settling in Italy).

The title of the work Rêve lucide is also the title of the artist’s first solo show, held at the  P420 gallery in Bologna in 2023, and consisting of this and other similar terracotta sculptures made between 2021 and 2023: reclining on brick bases and on a bed of soil, the sculptures are arranged in space according to a non-linear and non-hierarchical narrative order. Choosing a plastic idiom steeped in magic realism, Fotso Nyie uses clay as a vehicle with which to transmit images and tales, and as a place of encounter with his ancestral spirits– a meeting that takes place via the dimension of the dream, an oneiric universe in which personal and collective memories are combined. Made with dark clay and featuring a smooth and waxy finish, submitted to double firing, these anthropomorphic figures are filled with references and sensibilities belonging to the pan-African vernacular culture and in particular to the spiritual wisdom of West Africa. These are mostly self-portraits ingeniously combined with figures that reproduce the forms of traditional sub-Saharan African sculptures: unfaithful reproductions of wooden statuettes found in urban markets or in the archives of ethnographic museums. They appear to interweave the biographical narrative and collective memory of a historical trauma: the one inherited from the pillaging of the artistic heritage during the colonial conquests and indirect government, and currently being disputed in European museums.

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