At barely 30, Epaphras Toïhen already commands a body of work of impressive maturity.

This 3rd generation prodigy was nurtured early on by his father and grandfather, both master-sculptors trained at the mythical Dohoundji Atelier, located on the edges of ‘Oro Zoun’, the sacred forest near Agonli-Houégbo, in the Zou region of Benin, in West Africa.Thus, art is fundamentally inherent to Epaphras Toihen’s personal journey. Through lineage, by tradition, culture, history and most importantly by his native land.

In his creative corpus, Toïhen formulates an aesthetic that echoes not only to primordial archetypes such as purity and intemporality but confronts us with notions of sustainability, the passing of time and memory preservation.

The sculptures by Epaphras Toïhen are like portals to the spiritual realm of nature. In his practice, the artist addresses fundamental questions as to where humanity stands in relations to nature and the cosmos.

The sculptor's masterful hand carving technique reveals the semantic hidden within the soul of wood. The iconic stripes Toïhen carves into the flesh of the kernel are an homage to the scarifications of the sacred Voodoo rituals which are inherently part of Benin’s spiritual ordinance.

Through his inventive approach to form and abstraction, Epaphras Toïhen accesses a cathartic dimension where thoughts and feelings arise organically, beyond the realm of mere beauty, with each interstice revealing the stratum of our shared humanity.