Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 4

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, and beset by the caprices of a Nature deranged 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 guiding thread, we find his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and Sénoufo silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of color in fusion, on the edge of figuration.

Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an undetermined stage of humanity (earlier, later?). Children, animals, all are depicted frontal, their faces half-drawn. He paints, sculpt—shapes kraft, clay; he works canvases in graphic series, recycles wood. Soly Cissé explores risky, uncharted paths. He is possessed by a healthy anger, confident enough in his influences to not name them. Attuned to the urban world, he is among those who can calmly shed the adjective “African,” without regret or remorse, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, Cissé’s, decisive, nervous, agile, picks up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Quick, he captures being by default; figures are born from the formless without forcing them. Just a wink at destiny.

The work of Soly Cissé is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous graphism. In his collages, the spirits and the eerie or protective figures do not reveal the divinities of a culture, but a phantasmagoria.

There is in him a clear will to provoke fertile and dynamic tension. The more one penetrates his microcosm peopled with spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between deep blues and sharp yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow and patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony is gradually restored, adjusting its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)