Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 16

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tormented by doubt, and at the mercy of the whims 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, are 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.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an unlocated stage (before, after?) of humanity. Children, animals, all are taken head-on, their faces half-drawn. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft and clay, works canvases in graphic series, recycles wood. Soly Cissé explores risky, novel paths. He is possessed by a healthy anger, confident enough in his influences not to name them. Attuned to the urban world, he is one of those who can calmly part with the adjective “African,” without regret or remorse, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, Cissé’s, decisive, nerve-wracking, agile, picks up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Fast, he captures the being by default; the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to destiny.

Soly Cissé’s work is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous graphism. 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 clear willingness to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one penetrates 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, adjusting its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)