Soly CISSÉ, 1969

Soly Cissé was born in 1969 in Dakar, Senegal. He lives and works in Dakar.

In 1995 Soly Cissé did an workshop in photography which was followed by an exhibition at the Centre Culturel Français in Dakar, organized by Kodak. Cissé graduated in 1996 from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dakar.

The theme of Cissé 's paintings is repeatedly the duality between tradition and modernity. As an example, he uses arrows to separate Good from Evil, in vertical and horizontal lines to picture life and death and also to contrast colors. They show an extreme fury of the individuum towards a world left to its own.
Cissé shows the individuum which has dropped his ethnic identity and is now entangled in his self made restrictions.This impersonality reflects also in the play with silhouetts, profiles and shades, all of which have their roots in the aesthetic tradition of Africa.

However, in his pictures these plays have lost their original meaning. The pictures show the isolated human, left alone to himself as a shadow of his true being.

Soly Cissé sees the growing danger of self-destruction by increasing dissolution of moral thresholds, but he does not intent to advise. He sees himself as a person of his epoch who tries to reach people's consciences to show the grief and the misery of the society. His aim is to train people's understanding of what he lives for, what he suffers. Freedom has to be defended with all might.