Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 2

SOLY CISSÉ

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters tortured by doubt, and beset by the whims of a Nature deranged 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 guiding thread, we find 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 (earlier, later?) of humanity. Children, animals, all are confronted head-on, their faces half‑sketched. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft, clay, he works the canvases in graphic series, recycles wood. Soly Cissé explores risky, unprecedented paths. He is inhabited 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 part with the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, decided by Cissé, nervous, agile, picks up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Quick, he captures the being by default, the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing them. Just a wink to destiny.

The work of Soly Cissé is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous graphic style. 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 stated will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The more one penetrates into his microcosm populated by spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and striking 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 there, who goes straight to the point.”

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)