Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 16

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, and 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 extends to various media; collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his realizations, as a through line, we find 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 unlocated stage of humanity (before or after?). Children, animals, all are captured frontally, their faces half-drawn. He paints, sculpts, shapes 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 not to name them. Attuned to the urban world, he is among those who can serenely discard the adjective “African,” with no regret or remorse, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, Cissé’s line, decisive, nervous, agile, resumes the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Quick, he captures the being by default, the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to destiny.

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

There is in him a clear will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one penetrates his microcosm peopled with spirits and monsters, the more the major 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, adjusts its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)