Dago

Franco Riccardo, Naples
Through June 15

Ousmane Ndiaye Dago, following in the tradition of the great Senegalese photographers such as Meïssa Gaye or Mama & Sala Casset, prefers to work strictly inside the studio. He does not refer to the outside world; indeed, he does not focus on anything that occurs outside his atelier. For Dago, photography is the complete synthesis of installation, sculpture, and painting, which merge to form a unique, theatrical language. His tableaux are immortalized in a series of photographs on PVC - on show for the first time in Europe - which are the results of scrupulous directing and of the meticulous juxtaposition of minute details.

Like a set-designer, Dago paints the backgrounds in a technique similar to action painting; he makes up the bodies of his models, covering them with a paste of marble dust which he then reworks, in a second phase, painting them with bright colors; then he arranges the poses, organizes the lighting, and finally frames the assemblage.

With these thorough preparations, the artist derives a delicate equilibrium: bodies are transformed into the volumes of a picture in which the backdrop and foreground subjects meld into a uniform whole. Inspired by a recurring motif in the works of Magritte, Dago never reveals the faces of his young models - each one a wild, modern-day Venus - covering them with tangled and curly manes of hair, with diaphanous colored fabrics, or by photographing them from the back.

Yet, while the Senegalese artist exalts in the beauty and sensuality of their bodies, he also covers and deadens them by imprisoning their breasts and stomachs in these armatures of plaster and earth, cut with deep chromatic slashes. The young women are depersonalized, their features negated, and they become mere matter to be molded, incised, and painted. He turns them into living sculptures, believable and inanimate, displayed in the forum of the photograph.




Francesco Galdieri
Translation by Amanda Coulson