Romuald Hazoumè’s My Blue Period Gives Plastic Containers a Face in London
At October Gallery through November 21, blue containers and found objects become expressive masks. Feathers, fibres and installation views offer different ways into the work.
October Gallery in London is showing Romuald Hazoumè’s My Blue Period through November 21, 2026. Repurposed plastic containers and found objects become masks, with blue a prominent thread. Handles, openings and wear remain visible while additions suggest human postures. Look closely and a former everyday object and a newly formed portrait can coexist.
How a container opening becomes a face
The official image of Autlan de Navarro centres an inverted blue container: a round opening reads as a mouth, the handle as a raised nose, and feathers spread above and to the side. Facial suggestion comes from rearranging objects rather than making plastic resemble realistic skin. Listed as found objects from 2024–25, the work measures 50 × 60 × 18cm; it was not newly made in the gallery during this exhibition.
Chênnai, 2024–25, found objects, 58 × 30 × 22cm. Official gallery artwork image.
Chênnai also uses a blue container, with fibrous material piled at the top and a long bundle falling to one side. Its round hole remains low on the form. Compared with the feathers spreading outward, this work gathers weight above and extends it sideways. The gallery lists 58 × 30 × 22cm and 2024–25. The image supports observations of shape and colour, not an exact identification of the fibres’ origin or the person represented.
Blue offers more than a palette
The gallery links the title to Picasso’s Blue Period and to the African-American musical tradition of the Blues: colour carrying emotion, and music voicing shared marginalised experience. These are interpretive connections, not a promise of a Blues soundtrack or Picasso works in the show. Return to Hazoumè’s own handling of material and form.
An official installation view shows masks spaced across white walls, with wooden flooring and room between their distinct forms. A motorcycle-and-container assemblage stands centrally. From this viewpoint they are not a tightly packed decorative row, but separate presences able to face one another. The gallery also connects the artist’s practice to migration, history and power. Those contexts inform looking without making every unexplained detail one fixed political symbol.
Official installation view of My Blue Period, with masks spaced across white walls.
Bloomsbury visiting hours differ from the café’s
October Gallery is at 24 Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AL. Its published visiting hours are Tuesday–Saturday, 12:30–17:30, closing on official holidays. Nearby Underground options include Holborn, Russell Square and Tottenham Court Road. The café runs Tuesday–Friday, 12:30–14:30; do not substitute its lunch hours for gallery hours or assume separate events are included in a general visit.
This is an ongoing London exhibition, not an October 30 opening. Confirm the day’s arrangements and admission conditions before travelling. Alongside asking what a sculpture is made from, consider how little must change before a handle, hole, fibres and feathers become a face. Keeping the objects’ earlier traces visible makes these masks at once familiar and unsettled.
