Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 13

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and his paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, caught in the whims of a Nature upset by Humans. Soly Cissé is a multidisciplinary artist... His art extends across various media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his works, as a through-line, appear his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and silhouettes of Senoufos. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of melting color, on the threshold of figuration.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage (earlier, later?) of humanity. Children, animals, all are captured frontally, their faces half-sketched. He paints, sculpts, fashions 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 to not name them. Attuned to the urban world, he is one of those who can calmly part from the adjective “African,” without regret or remorse, since Africa today lives in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, Cissé’s decided, nervous, agile, takes up the charcoal where distant ancestors left it. Quick, he captures the being by default; figures are born from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink at destiny.

Soly Cissé’s work is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous graphic language. 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 deeper one goes into his microcosm filled with spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and garish 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 without a doubt a major artist here, straight to the point.”

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)