Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 14

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages figures tortured by doubt, beset by the whims of a Nature unsettled by Humankind. Soly Cissé is an artist with protean work... His art extends across various media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his realizations, as a through-line, are his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti, and Senoufos silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the moving melt of color, on the edge of figuration.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage (earlier, later?) of humanity. Children, animals, all are seized face-on, their faces half-sketched. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft and 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 calmly dispense with the adjective “African,” with no regret or repentance, since Africa today is within him, as a driver of modernity. The line, Cissé’s, decisive, tense, agile, takes up the charcoal where distant ancestors left it. Quick, he captures the being by default, figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to destiny.

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

There is in him a clear willingness to provoke fertile and dynamic tension. The deeper you go into his microcosm populated by spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and glaring yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow and patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually reestablishes itself, adjusting its balance.

“There is without a doubt a major artist here, who goes straight to the point.”

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)