DAKAR.- The Cécile Fakhoury Gallery is presenting Métamorphoses ondulatoires (Undulatory metamorphoses), a solo exhibition by Senegalese artist Serigne Ibrahima Dieye.
Human-sized squares with matte black backgrounds form dark gaps in the gallery space. Characters, half-human, half-animal, half-monsters make a spectacle of themselves in a parody of media action performed with disconcerting conviction. Scene of interviews, oratorical jousts, parades of eloquence, parade of words and wrongs; the exhibition resounds of a deafening hubbub in the tones of fake news.
It is said that painting is "like an open window through which one can look at history". Step back a little, place yourself at the focal point of the perspective and act as an informed observer of the world's progress. Such is the program of painting of Serigne Ibrahima Dieye. For the artist, the canvas is a revealing filter, a visual elixir of truth. Like the television screen whose figure runs through the exhibition, it captures the waves of the world and transcribes them in their materiality. Undulatory metamorphoses. The resulting show is all the more frightening as it is jubilatory: the plump announcer with a skull and crossbones has put on her best attire to pour out her dregs of lies live. The accessories of the perfect commentator look like toys made in China from a child's outfit. In the background, in the distance, skulls, shadows, monsters.
In this new series of works, Serigne Ibrahima Dieye once again resorts to the fable and explores the powers of the grotesque to denounce. Laughter, grating and cynical, becomes under the artist's brush a disarming tool to give thought to the manufacture of a society obsessed with communication and drunk with appearances. But here, laughter also requires a pause, to catch one's breath between each canvas, from one window to another, to understand: aren't we laughing at ourselves, spectators of a show in which our role is precisely to be spectators?
Behind the frightfully funny scenes, the portrait is uncompromising: our world is a vast media farce that acts as a machine to manufacture opinion and self-righteousness while striving to replace communication and information with deceptive appearances. At the center of the exhibition, the installation Glitch(2021) hypnotizes us with its screens with a blurred image. Without the sound, diffused in the following room, the range of the images is different and the difficult perception that we have of it makes us leave our torpor of consumer to launch us in the desperate search of a sense.
There is finally something of baroque in the works of Serigne Ibrahima Dieye; the cohabitation of contradictory forces - violence and laughter - refers us to the vanity of our desires and to the fallacious values that some try to erect as the values of our contemporary societies. The painter then, by the aesthetic power of painting, becomes here our conscience objector.
