Soly Cissè : Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi

The Kyo Noir Studio presents another act of Ex Africa Semper aliquid novi with Senegalese artist Soly Cissè in an exhibition titled 'Physiologus,' curated by Antonella Pisilli. If we deny that in the current historical condition, art is no longer a means of communicating our contemporaneity, painting is certainly its farthest means of telling the story of today. Even so, painting still remains the most sensitive and the most suitable medium to appropriate the artist's inner drive and convey the deepest human feeling. Matter is the continuous becoming of reality and being, matter has the capacity to show its past, transform and become future and to be and manifest its present.

 

In Cissè's work, matter becomes existence, which fails to recognize itself and become aware of the self, which does not define a time or place, but represents the motion and fleeting experience of being. Cissè arranges the pictorial matter directly on the canvas in thick layers that tangle. One moment with violent, decisive gestures and the next gently like a light breath. Painting becomes existential motion that alternates the flow of pure living matter, from which fantastic and chimerical creatures emerge as entangled and captive, making the artist assume the authority of an imaginary Physiologus.

 

Physiologus understood not as a scholar of nature, but as a sublime interpreter of nature. The fantastical creatures that inhabit Cissé's paintings struggle to transform themselves from formless beings to real figures, which through the imagination of our minds materialize from pure illegible signs into representations of the abstract thought of our subconscious. The exhibition Phisiologus represents a journey within our deepest soul, a journey into the unconscious, but in order to succeed on the journey it is necessary to look deeply into the work, to immerse oneself in the folds of the painting, in the traces of color that fade inward, and to surrender oneself in total and sublime contemplation.