Soly Cissé (1969) - Serie Héritage 5

In his collages and paintings, he stages characters 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 to diverse media: collages, paintings, installations, video, sculptures, ... In each of his realizations, 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 unlocated stage of humanity (earlier, later?)—Children, animals, all are captured frontally, their faces half-drawn. He paints, sculpts, shapes kraft, clay; he works 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 of those who can calmly dispense with the adjective “African,” without regret or repentance, since Africa today is in him, as a factor of modernity. The line, decisive in Cissé, nervous, agile, picks up the charcoal where his distant ancestors left it. Rapid, he captures the being by default; figures are thus born from the formless without forcing it. Just a wink to destiny.

The work of Soly Cissé is remarkable for its singular, spontaneous 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 more one dives into his microcosm teeming with spirits and monsters, the more the great confrontations between intense blues and shrill yellows assert themselves. It is in the slow and patient discovery of his plastic language that harmony gradually reestablishes itself, adjusting its balance.

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

Philippe Dagen (Le Monde)