ESSOH SESS

Presentation

Born in Toupah (Côte d'Ivoire) in 1988, Sess Essoh obtained his Diplôme d'Études Supérieures Artistiques (Master II, Mural Art option) from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts d'Abidjan in 2012. He lives and works in Bingerville (Côte d'Ivoire). Fascinated by his father's practice of recording his daily life in a diary, he turned his attention to literature and history, while developing a passion for the celebrations and traditional rites of his community. His later confrontation with the urban world of Abidjan would challenge his achievements and blunt his certainties. He discovers a restless, unjust and all too often violent world. He mingles with a multicultural youth that manages to recode its universe with singular narratives that surprise him as much as they open him up to the multiple diversity of feelings and interpretations. Building on these experiences, a more rebellious path opens up for him, inscribed in the use of poetry and writing, which naturally carry his questioning into the critical analysis of society, witnessing the erosion of positivism but also the falsification of History. The sum total of knowledge, learning and questioning is formalized through collages, the addition of gold leaf or colored crepons, and shapes converse with signs, whether alphabetic or derived from ancient traditions, in a chatter that calls on viewers to doubt their knowledge and challenge their certainties. A provocative pedagogy, the sequencing of his production in episodes aims to dramatize an imaginary society that is symbolic of our world, like a parody of the human comedy. His actors are the evocation of caricatured figures, with the Plaster Men representing ordinary people exposed to corruption and mediocrity, while the Cardinals are the masters of time, immortals and arbiters of this great comedy. In his latest series, Origin of a Cardinal , they take on the image of iconic figures who have marked the history of the Continent, in dialogue with shadowy figures awaiting their rehabilitation. Time hasn't changed, everything seems to have stopped, except for the great chatter that scribbles across space. Source : https://www.louisimoneguirandou.gallery/artists/60-essoh-sess/overview/