Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 5

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, and at the mercy of the caprices of a Nature deranged by Man.
Soly Cissé is an artist of protean work... His art extends across diverse media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his works, as a guiding thread, you find his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti, and Sénoufo silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of melting color, on the edge of figuration.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an undated stage of humanity (before or after?) of humanity. Children, animals, all are captured frontally, their faces half-drawn. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft, clay, he works canvases in graphic series, recycles wood. Soly Cissé explores risky, novel 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 shed the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a driver of modernity. The line, Cissé’s, decided, nervous, agile, picks up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left off. Fast, he captures the 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 graphics. In his collages, the spirits and the eerie or protective figures do not reveal the deities of a culture, but a phantasmagoria.
There is in him a stated will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one penetrates his microcosm populated by spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and piercing yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow and patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually reestablishes itself, adjusts its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)