Soly Cissè : Bestiaro
Past exhibition
The Kyo Noir Studio presents a rising star of the new generation of contemporary artists from Senegal, Soly Cissé. In his works he combines a mythology of human and animal forms, unlikely beings: tangled bodies, death masks, animal hybrids. A painter, draftsman and sculptor, an admirer of Bacon and Basquiat, he explores those languages with boldness and vigor. He listens to the urban world, and manages through a manipulation of signs to absorb the adjective "African" without repentance, without regret, because the Africa of today is in him, as a propeller of modernity.
Soly Cissé in each of his paintings stages the representation of humanity from its origins to the present day. Deformed faces, monstrous animals, shapeless figures, iconographically savage compositions mindful of a lived past and a present in the making. Filled with terrifying and grotesque sacred-representation cues, there is an extraordinary evocative energy in his works, from Dante's Inferno, which expresses itself on irregular planes with a fragmented rhythm, full of obsessive repetition and abrupt jerks. He is a painter who wants to revive his past with a new language, and his present with an iconography full of evocative tension.
In the work le Métamorphoses Cissé shapes and amalgamates in color human figures with animal heads, the deep red in the foreground absorbs into itself in its own vigor of pigment the other figures, and the chiaroscuro obliterates the contours causing the images to lose depth as they are lost in the various non-perspective planes. Each detail in the painting tells a story that reconnects through a reminder, an invisible thread to another point in the painting. Cissé's vision is dreamlike, rich in ancestral references, reviving in his works with a dramatically universal language. Soly Cissé is considered one of the most interesting and promising contemporary African artists on the international art scene. His most important exhibitions include participation in the famous traveling exhibition Africa Remix and numerous participations in the Dakar Biennial, of which he was also the winner.
