Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 9

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and his paintings, he stages figures tortured by doubt, beset by the caprices of a Nature unsettled by Man. Soly Cissé is an artist with a protean body of work... His art spans various media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his creations, the thread running through is his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and Senghor silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of fusioned color, on the edge of figuration.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an undefined stage of humanity (before or after?). Children, animals, all are captured frontally, their faces half-sketched. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft and clay, works the 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 among those who can serenely do away with the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, 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 off. Quick, he captures the being in default; the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to destiny.

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

There is in him a clear 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 deep blues and jarring yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow and patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually re-establishes itself, adjusting its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)