Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 11

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages figures tortured by doubt, at the mercy of the whims of a Nature unsettled by Humankind. Soly Cissé is an artist with a protean body of work... His art spans diverse media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculpture, ... In each of his creations the through-line is his hybrid beings, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti, and Senoufo silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of color in fusion, on the edge of figuration.
Incomplete creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage of humanity (earlier, later?). Children, animals, all are faced head-on, their faces half-drawn. 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 not to cite them. Attuned to the urban world, he is one of those who can calmly part with the adjective “African,” without regret or apology, 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. Fast, he captures the being by default; the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to destiny.

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 deliberate will to provoke a fertile, dynamic tension. The deeper one goes into 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, patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually reestablishes itself, adjusts its balance.

"There is, without hesitation, a major artist here, straight to the point."

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)