Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 15

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, and at the mercy of the caprices of a Nature upset by Humankind. Soly Cissé is an artist with a protean body of work... His art extends across a variety of media; collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his realizations, as a guiding thread, one finds 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.
Untouched creatures and characters belonging to an indeterminate stage (before, 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, unprecedented paths. He is possessed by a healthy anger, confident enough in his influences not to cite them. Attuned to the urban world, he is among those who can serenely part with the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, decisively his, nervous, agile, takes up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Quick, he captures the being by default, the figures thus arise from the formless without jolting it. Just a nod to fate.

The work of Soly Cissé is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous graphy. 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 you delve into his microcosm populated by 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, adjusts its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)