 The Ousmane Ndiaye Dago’s work can be considered part of the innovation of contemporary African Art. He represents female bodies, naked African women whose bodies and figures are hidden and at the same time enhanced by different materials and fabrics. With an extreme care the artist wraps the fabrics on the figures and with strokes of mud, chalk, clay and sports of dry colours on their skin he transforms them in a kind of simulacrum, or as he says in “femme-terre”, earth-femme made of marble. To enhance the strain of the representation, Dago covers the faces of the women with their hair, even it styled by mud and clay. At the and he fixes the forms with a picture. The skin becomes a surface on which the photographer, as a sculptor, carves shapes in a statuesque pose. Women become earth because they are made of the same colour, shape and consistency. The creative action of Dago begins with the setting of the stage, the choice of the actresses and their costumes like in a sort of theatre.
“Obsession is Dago’s yardstick. The idea of an earth-femme and the “theatre of cruelty” within which she is depicted seems so intense that I wonder whether he will ever “update” it, as we say. Perhaps it shall be the very concept of theatre to suggest some unique variation for him. After all, Dago is also an avid formalist: the rafined eroticism and clever layout of his groupings has a classicist organisation and as the figures bend and flex one is reminded of Liberty: girls as flowers that Fin de Siècle were set to blossom in an interlacement of curves and who appear to have already flourished in his photographs amid a cataclysm of colour, or to put it more aptly, from within a climate of Grand Guignol, emphasising the theatricality of his artwork.” (…)
E. Mascelloni
Ousmane Ndiaye Dago was born in Ndiobene, Senegal in 1951. He graduated in Plastic Arts at the National Fine Arts Institute in Senegal, and he also graduated in Graphic Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Anvers. He cooperated with some artists of world renown such as Youssoun Dour and Thione Seck. He took part in a lot of exhibitions both in Senegal and Europe: the Biennial of Dakar, the Biennial of Venice, the Spazia Gallery of Bologna, the Contemporary Art Study of Brescia, the Franco Riccardo Gallery of Naples, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Rocca di Umbertide.
Curators
Enrico Mascelloni and Sarenco
Place of exhibition
Centro Espositivo Palazzo dei Sette, Orvieto
Info
info@acaservices.it tel. 0763.315740
Period
09 January – 22 February 2009 from Tuesday to Sunday
Open time
10:30 – 13:00 e 14:30 – 17:00 Free entry
Vernissage
Friday 9 January, 18:00
Organization and press office: ACAS Eventi, Orvieto
Patronage: Comune di Orvieto
(29-12-2008 07:24)
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