The Cécile Fakhoury Gallery – Abidjan presents the first solo exhibition of the Senegalese artist Serigne Ibrahima Dieye.

In a converted space, aiming at disturbing the visitor’s spatial bearings, Serigne Ibrahima Dieye proposes a series of paintings, works on paper as well as an immersive installation, in the continuation of his reflections on the political and social landscape of our contemporary societies.

In the manner of a visual fable, the artist depicts the story of a confrontation between characters masked as animals, whose thirst for power, selfishness and obscure motivations evoke a certain category of world rulers. Serigne Ibrahima Dieye installs this contemporary jungle in the heart of the gallery space, inhabits it with threatening anthropomorphic allegories and carries the visitor into the depths of this hostile universe.

Serigne Ibrahima Dieye thus forces us to face the aberrations of our societies head-on and unadorned. The artist pushes us to reflect on our role in the world’s shaping, on our share of individual responsibility, while making the creative gesture a privileged act of resilience towards the abyss.

As a visual artist, Serigne Ibrahima Dieye sees his role as a committed one. For the artist, it is a question of showing what we do not see; of making heard what is whispered in the background. Making forms appear; materializing through art ideas as a set of grey areas – often obscure – that one would place in the light to better observe and decompose them.

The characters in Serigne Ibrahima Dieye’s paintings and installations are ideas to which the artist has given body and matter. They are visual allegories of evils that tear contemporary societies apart, but not only: once on canvas, on paper, or embodied in wood, these ideas take on their autonomy and become the protagonists of a dramatic narrative whose interpretation is the responsibility of the spectators.

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