Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 7

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, and at the mercy of the whims of a Nature destabilized by Man.
Soly Cissé is an artist with a protean body of work... His art extends to diverse media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... One finds in each of his pieces, as a throughline, his hybrids, his animals, his spirits, pictograms, graffiti and Senoufo silhouettes. Forms emerge, caught in the movement of molten color, on the edge of figuration.

Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an undetermined stage of humanity (earlier, later?) — children, animals — are all captured frontally, their faces only half sketched. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft and clay, works canvases into 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 among those who can serenely dispense 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-ridden, agile, takes up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left off. Quick, he captures the being from the default; figures thus emerge from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to destiny.

Soly Cissé’s work is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous script. In his collages, the spirits and the eerie or protective figures do not reveal the divinities of a culture, but a phantasmagoria.

There is in him a clear intent to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one delves into his microcosm populated by spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between deep blues and sharp yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow and patient discovery of his visual language that harmony is gradually restored, rebalancing itself.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)