SOLY CISSÉ
Soly Cissé, a Senegalese artist, was born in Dakar in 1969. He is a painter, sculptor, scenographer and photographer.
A graduate of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dakar in 1996 and top of his class, Soly Cissé exhibited at the Jeux de la Francophonie in Madagascar in 1997, as well as in Düsseldorf, Montreal, Nice, Madrid, and elsewhere. Paintings of half-human, half-animal figures, sculptures of totems and imaginary trees in rainbow colors, and series of black-and-white drawings in a mythical and mystical universe are at the heart of Soly Cissé’s work, erasing the boundaries between the real and imaginary worlds. His work takes shape in spontaneity and improvisation, highlighting the movements and adventure of complex beings and radiating energy with warm colors, gradients…
Soly Cissé’s work, rooted in the solidity of line and figure, imposes a massive presence, as menacing as a threat, an accusation by the forgotten against the world order that crushes them. In his drawings, the men have strange, aborted, shapeless faces. Unfinished creatures, sketches of men fixed at an earlier (later?) stage of humanity. The figures seem to exist only through number, a lineup of a pre-humanity.
Curator. Hafida Jemni Di Folco
“Soly CISSÉ creates a body of work that resembles him: lively and colorful, violent and poetic, welcoming and fraternal, mysterious and intriguing, which enlists us under a single banner to say what even words can no longer say.”
Sylvain Sankalé
