Soly Cissé, 1969

Soly Cissé was born in 1969 in Dakar, Senegal, where he continues to live and work.

In 1995, Cissé completed a photography workshop that culminated in an exhibition at the Centre Culturel Français in Dakar, organized by Kodak. He graduated in 1996 from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dakar.

A recurring theme in Cissé’s work is the **duality between tradition and modernity**. He uses arrows to separate good from evil, vertical and horizontal lines to symbolize life and death, and contrasting colours to express tension. His paintings often convey the fury of the individual confronting a world abandoned to itself.

Cissé portrays individuals who have shed their ethnic identity and become entangled in self-imposed constraints. This impersonality appears in his use of silhouettes, profiles, and shadows — forms rooted in African aesthetic traditions but stripped of their original meaning. His figures often appear isolated, reduced to shadows of their true selves.

Cissé warns of the growing danger of self-destruction as moral thresholds erode, though he does not seek to moralize. He sees himself as a witness of his era, striving to awaken consciousness by revealing the grief and misery of contemporary society. His aim is to sharpen our understanding of what he lives for — and what he suffers. For him, **freedom must be defended with all one’s strength**.

FR