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.
Often, the artist uses the animal figure to better express the human and its wrongs as in fables, this thousand-year-old form of narrative with multiple geographies, from ancient Persia to the middle-age Mediterranean, from La Fontaine to Birago Diop.
To create his works, Serigne Ibrahima Dieye also draws on today's society, its myths of success and its curses; its violence and creative vivacity; its popular stories and forgotten territories. There is no hierachy in the artist's choice of subjects: it is a matter of telling the story of oneself, and in so doing, giving oneself material to reinvent oneself.
Through a strong plastic gesture, the artist intends to denounce the systemic violence of our contemporary world, while trying to create the conditions for each person to reflect on his or her share of responsibility and the role that one can choose to take - or not - in this world.
Image : Not for Sale #2, 2019