Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 5

In his collages and paintings, he stages figures tortured by doubt, beset by the caprices of a Nature deranged by Humankind.
Soly Cissé is an artist of protean work... His art extends across diverse media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his creations, as a guiding thread, 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 undetermined stage of humanity (earlier or later?)—Children, animals, all are presented frontal and their faces are half-sketchy. He paints, sculpt[s], shapes kraft, 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 not to name them. Attentive to the urban world, he is among those who can calmly shed the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, Cissé’s decided, nervous, agile, takes up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left off. Quick, he captures the being by default; the figures thus arise from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink of fate.

Soly Cissé’s work is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous graf‑language (graphy). 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 will to provoke a fertile and dynamic tension. The deeper 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 re-establishes itself, balancing its equilibrium.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)