Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 12

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, and at the mercy of the whims of a Nature destabilized by Man. Soly Cissé is an artist of protean work... His art extends across various media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his creations, as a through-line, one finds his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and Senoufo silhouettes. Shapes emerge, caught in the movement of merging color, teetering on the edge of figuration. Unfinished creatures and figures belonging to an undetermined stage of humanity (earlier, later?)—Children, animals, all are seized frontally, their faces half-sketched. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft, clay; he works canvases in graphic series, recycles wood. Soly Cissé explores risky, unprecedented paths. He is possessed by a healthy anger, confident enough in his influences not to name them. Attuned to the urban world, he is among those who can serenely shed the label “African,” without regret or apology, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line of Cissé, decisive, nervous, agile, picks up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Fast, he captures being by default; the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a nod to destiny. The work of Soly Cissé is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous graphic language. In his collages, the spirits and the unsettling or protective figures do not reveal the divinities of a culture, but a phantasmagoria. He has a clearly expressed will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one delves into his microcosm populated with spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and shrill yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow, patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually reasserts itself, balancing itself. “There is without hesitation a major artist here, who goes straight to the point.” Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)