Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 10

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages figures tormented by doubt, and at the mercy of the caprices of a Nature unsettled by Man.
Soly Cissé is an artist with a protean body of work... His art extends across various media; collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his realizations, as a guiding thread, you find his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and Senoufo silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of merging color, on the edge of figuration.
Incomplete creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage of humanity (earlier, later?) 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, uncharted paths. He is possessed by a healthy anger, confident enough in his influences not to name them. Attuned to the urban world, he is of those who can calmly shed the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, determined by Cissé, nervous, agile, picks up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Quick, he captures the being by default; figures are born from the formless without forcing it. Just a glance at destiny.

Soly Cissé’s work is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous script. 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 pronounced will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one enters 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 visual language that harmony gradually reestablishes itself, adjusting its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)