Soly Cissé - Serie Héritage III

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, beset by the whims of a Nature unsettled by Man. Soly Cissé is an artist with a protean body of work... His art extends to various media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his creations, as a guiding thread, are his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and Senoufos silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the motion of melting color, on the edge of figuration.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage of humanity (earlier, later?). Children, animals, all are frontal photographed, their half-drawn faces. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft, clay; he works the canvases in graphic series, recycles wood. Soly Cissé explores risky, unseen paths. He is possessed by a healthy anger, confident enough in his influences not to name them. Attuned to the urban world, he is one of those who can calmly dispense with the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, Cissé’s, decisive, nervous, agile, picks up where his distant ancestors left the charcoal. Quick, he captures the being by default; figures are born from the formless without forcing it. Just a glance of fate.

Cissé’s oeuvre is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous graphic language. In his collages, the spirits and the troubling or protective figures do not reveal the divinities of a culture, but a phantasmagoria.

There is in him a clear, determined will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one penetrates his little cosmos populated by spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between deep blues and jarring yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow and patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually reestablishes itself, adjusting its balance.

“Undoubtedly, there is a major artist here, straight to the point.”

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)