Mamadou Cissé

He began drawing in order to stay awake during his long night shifts. These drawings, the fruit of his nightly vigils, took shape as manifestations of fantastical cities, suspended between nocturnal imaginings and the daily realities of contemporary urban milieus. Cissé took his inspiration from publications, photographs, and his travels to New York, Moscow, London and Cairo. His drawings depict aerial views of vast urban landscapes. They are meticulously rendered using pencil, ball point and felt pens, and are reminiscent of kaleidoscopic views where axial networks of roads and the courses of rivers crisscross in an artfully contrived play of perspective, the whole resulting in a framework of motifs that approaches abstraction. Cissé shapes contemporary cities transfigured by colour whose monuments, in his words, “are in movement, reaching to the sky, with water, colour and energy.”

In 2012, the Fondation Cartier presented his work in the exhibition Histoires de Voir, which brought together the works of around fifty artists, all autodidacts, many of whom had never been shown in major venues. In the wake of this exhibition, six works by Cissé were acquired by the Fondation Cartier.