Ça devait être different

Concept

The spontaneity and the gestures of the bodies are at the heart of Ousmane Bâ's artistic approach. As a mobile artist, always on the move - from Paris to Tokyo, via Amsterdam and Berlin - his pictorial practice and graphic design is part of an aesthetic research in dialogue with the modernity of the avant-garde from the beginning of the 20th century. The aerial energy of Nijinsky's ballets and Wilfredo Lam's magical expressionism come to mind when observing his artistic corpus. Silhouettes in weightlessness and tension, arching and embracing - the search for postures appears to be central to the artist's approach. The vibrant colors, rendered by ink or paint, is put at the service of a luminous vitalism. The silhouettes sometimes multiply within the same composition, drawing a graphic and silent ballet. One thinks of Rodin's paper cut-out silhouettes, or of the chronophotography developping at the end of 19th century, and of the multiple attempts to decompose the body in movement.

The transversality of Ousmane Bâ's work allows him to navigate with ease between painting and performance, dance, fashion, graphic design or street art. This plurality has for common point a quest for expression, which restores to the two-dimensional representation its share of mystery, calling for a certain technical refocusing.

The artist is indeed inspired by the techniques of Japanese printmaking, including, among others, the « Moku Hanga » technique (wood print), widely used in the « Ukiyo-e » genre – narrative and popular « images of the floating world » from the Edo period, and « Shodo », the art of calligraphy