Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 1

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tormented by doubt, and at the mercy of the whims of a Nature unsettled by Man. Soly Cissé is an artist of protean work... His art extends across various media; collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... One finds in each of his creations, as a through line, his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and Senoufo silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of color in fusion, on the edge of figuration.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage of humanity (earlier or later?). Children, animals, all are presented 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 cite them. Listening to the urban world, he belongs to those who can calmly shed the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, decisive in Cissé, tense, agile, picks up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left off. Quick, he captures being by default; figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to destiny.

The work of Soly Cissé is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous handwriting. 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 will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one enters 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 and patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually reestablishes itself, adjusting its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)