Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 3

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, assailed by the caprices of a Nature destabilized 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, as a through line, are his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and Senoufo silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the motion of merging color, on the edge of figuration.
Incomplete creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage of humanity (before or after?). Children, animals, all are captured frontally, their faces half-drawn. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft, clay, he 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 not to cite them. Listening to the urban world, he is one of those who can serenely part from 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 it. Quick, he captures the being by default; the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to fate.

Soly Cissé’s work is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous handwriting. In his collages, the spirits and the troubling 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 deeper one penetrates his microcosm populated by spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and glaring 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 no doubt about it: a major artist who goes straight to the point.”

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)