Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 2

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, caught in the whims of a Nature unsettled by Man. Soly Cissé is an artist of protean work... His art spans various media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculpture, ... In each of his creations, as a guiding thread, stand his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and silhouettes of sénoufos. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of molten color, on the edge of figuration.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage (before, after?) of humanity. Children, animals, all are shown frontally, their faces half-drawn. 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 to not cite them. Attuned to the urban world, he is one of those who can serenely part from the adjective “African,” with no regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. Cissé’s line, decisive, nervous, agile, takes up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Quick, he captures the being by default, the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a glance at destiny.

Soly Cissé’s work 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 intention to provoke a fertile, dynamic tension. The deeper one goes into his microcosm peopled with spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and jarring yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow, patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually re-establishes itself, adjusting its balance.

“There is no hesitation: here is a major artist who goes straight to the point.”

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)