Soly Cissé

Soly Cissé is a mixed media painter and sculptor from Dakar, and is one of Senegal’s most celebrated artists.

As a child, Cissé enjoyed drawing on the radiology that his father, a radiologist, brought home. Today, he is still fascinated by transparencies, light imposed on darkness, the essence of colours. When he paints, his brush reveals a scene, brings light to a story, and frees the characters trapped in the black background.

Cissé’s artworks are profoundly inspired by and contextualized through his upbringing. He grew up during an epoch of transition, following Senegal’s period of social and political unrest, where art served as mode of social activism and self-expression for the disenfranchised persons.

His work, like a portal where the imagined and physical realms convene, intuitively explores notions of duality and repetition; tradition and modernity, the spiritual and the secular. Soly refuses to imitate and abhors illustration. His work gives birth to a new world, populated by creatures neither completely human, neither completely animal nor completely legendary.

Cissé’s spontaneous painterly movements, textured accents and neo-expressionistic techniques form depictions reflective of the dissolution of society’s moral thresholds, shifts attributable to globalization and modernization. Shapeless human characters distort into anthropomorphic shadows of the other self; identities lost in translation from the past to the contemporary and abstract lines and bold strokes of contrasting hues intersect, creating a layered configuration of Cissé’s mythical visions.