FEATURED ARTIST
Laye Thioune
In ‘Les Traversées - Crossings’ Senegalese artist, Laye Thioune invites the viewer to traverse the divide of the Atlantic Ocean to that city on a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides, on the most western point of the African Continent. Dakar, Senegal is a place which beckons to the world - with both curiosity and welcome. Laye portrays all of this while also traveling back and forth between his own past, present and future.
As the well known art critic, Sylvain Sankalé states: "Laye Thioune practices both painting and sculpture, depending on his inspiration. By a surprising contrast, he often only paints faceless characters and only sculpts faces without bodies, one being able to compensate for the other in an endless back and forth.”
His works are steeped in the vivid colors of Dakar where the ochres of the desert meet the surprising deep blues and aquamarines of the ocean and where its inhabitants are robed in kaleidoscopic yards of cloth in jewel like colors. Underlying the seeming lightness of so much color there is also a layering of what could be interpreted as stoicism combined with a diffuse melancholy, which have its roots deep in the artist's lived experience.
Sankalé further states: "This succession of contrasts and the questions it raises in us exert a form of inexplicable fascination. His characters, observed from the front or the back - one never knows - give the impression of tiptoeing. Yet, it is not tranquility that they exude, but rather a form of instability, so characteristic of the artist's search and our search for meaning in our lives. Likewise, his masks, which we must remember their primary function is to hide and to disguise reality, are rarely smiling or happy and without ever expressing sadness! It is indeed a clever balance between more and less, too much and not enough!"