Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 11

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages figures tortured by doubt, beset by the whims of a Nature destabilized 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 creations, as a through line, are 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.
Unfinished creatures and characters belonging to an unfixed stage of humanity (earlier, later?)—children, animals—are all portrayed frontally, their faces half-sketched. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft paper and clay, he works 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 among those who can serenely do away with the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is within him, as a factor of modernity. The line, Cissé’s line, decisive, nervous, agile, resumes the charcoal where his distant ancestors left off. Quick, he captures the being by default; figures thus emerge from the formless without forcing it. Just a nod to destiny.

The work of Soly Cissé is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous handwriting. 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 declared will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one penetrates his microcosm filled with spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and jarring yellows assert themselves. It is through 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, going straight to the point.”

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)