I spent two weeks last winter timing the gallery lights in a storage room outside Korhogo. At dusk, the carved jaws stopped looking like evidence and began acting like weather: horn, snout, tooth, and shadow speaking in one low sentence.
A mask that once spat embers is not a statue with better lighting; it is an agreement between wood, smoke, and distance.
The problem is not display. It is daylight.
Conservators can measure oil, soot, and Bombax grain with admirable patience, but the ritual intelligence sits in movement. Lower the room, let one ember color pass across the ridge, and the surface remembers why it was made horizontal, dangerous, and alive.