The Montresso Foundation is hosting the project 'Décloisonnement' (Decompartmentalisation) by Sambou Diouf in Marrakech from 12 April to 5 July 2025.
Treating the studio as a laboratory, the Senegalese artist guides his mind by letting himself be led by mediums and processes. Neither a theoretical reflection nor a definition of a discourse, Sambou Diouf builds his great picture book step by step, where his hybrid figures highlight the continuity of living things and the incessant passages from animality to humanity. He first frequented the studio assiduously, with a desire to learn for more than ten years under his mentor Abdoulaye N’doye. Later, he became a laureate of the Dakar School of Fine Arts, and the studio then became his living space, a place for implementing his own thinking. Before our eyes, the artist builds a powerful body of work, peacefully assembling a kind of puzzle to grasp human nature. His subjects are funny, anthropomorphic and primitive characters, bizarre and familiar. Far from morality, his work explores the meanders of the 'Us', scrutinising the most sensitive fluctuations of our society with astonishing fertility.
Sambou Diouf has a cognitive relationship with the world, which refers back to childhood, which questions the pagan and the sacred. He delivers a metaphorical poetry where his subjects experience the unstable balance of tensions, experimenting with the complexity of solidarities always ready to unravel. By imitating animal figures, we learn to become human, the artist seems to whisper to us... Sambou Diouf draws up an alphabet of situations that questions us to better learn about ourselves. Jardin Rouge is also another studio he is fond of; the materials are as multiple as they are unusual – packaging, paper, plastic... – the artist uses the slightest roughness of his supports to breathe in his material. On kinds of sewing patterns, walnut stain, pastels, and natural pigments are the tools that give birth to his forms, to be then reassembled. The artist offers us prodigious palimpsests where the viewer feels the urgency to open up to other 'outsides'. The thing is undoubtedly not new, but the human comedy described delivers other resonances, unveiling the perceptual and cognitive mutations of a social world put to the test. Neither tales nor fables, Sambou Diouf's works are contemporary and popular journeys towards other dialects, other traditions, where physical, social, and political bodies question what we are, what we think, and what we live.
