Iba Ndiaye: A Painter Between Continents

Franz I ba Ndiaye was born in 1928 of a Muslim father and a Catholic I mother in the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal. Like all ports, S t I Louis was a meeting ground for diverse races and cultures. Ndiaye's first contact with oil painting came through pictures in a Catholic church in his hometown, therefore he knew the great masters of European art only from reproductions. Along with his schoolwork he took art classes. At the age of 15 he began painting posters for local cinemas that showed American and French films (film posters were individually painted rather than printed then). This activity introduced him to the modes of representation inherent in both photography and painting. The transposition of the photographic image onto a poster involved hardening the contrast and condensing into single lines the various shades of gray through which form is modeled. Moreover, this activity inspired Ndiaye to imitate the effects of exposing a strong moving light source to a film, through which successive positions of the light source are reproduced simultaneously. This effect is typical in photography but unusual in painting. It appeared to be the perfect means for suggesting movement in a static image. Ndiaye later returned to this technique by creating a representation of musical rhythms in his series, Jazz and Blues. Through subsequent architectural studies, first in Montpellier and then in Paris, Iba Ndiaye made his own another pictorial Black and White photo of Iba Ndiaye in his studio The prisoner, ink on paper, 1987, 2 9 " x 39.5 " Photo Beatrice Hatala. Photo Beatrice Hatala. A Painter Between Continent Fall/Winter 2001 Nka • 27 The cry, ink on paper, 1987, 18.5" x 15 " hoto Beatrice Hatala. means inspired by posters—the structural line. He traveled throughout Europe visiting the buildings and great museums he had learned about and before making his final decision to devote himself to painting , he worked in the Paris studio of the sculptor, Ossip Zadkine. Drawing became his principal tool in the structural analysis of the great masterpieces of European art and African sculpture. It allowed him to adopt a number of very different pictorial idioms. But this broad adaptation of widely varying expressive forms bears no relationship to the academic cliche of drawing from casts of antiquities. Rather, this was the foundation of an artistic project: constructing a visual vocabulary that is both personal and authentic. Iba Ndiaye's work develops in thematic series. Rather than following one after another in chronological order, these works overlap. They are dropped and then emporary African Art resume, each starting from some visual experience, which is in turn processed. In fact, they are never really concluded. They are not commentaries on any of the experiences or themes that once triggered them. Rather, the theme prompts the occasion—a catalyst around which pure painting develops. The first paintings of the Tabaski series were made in the early 1960s during Ndiaye's stay in Dakar. They refer to the ritual sacrifice of the lamb at the end of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, experiences inspired by the painter's youth in Saint-Louis as well as his surroundings in Dakar at the time. Iba Ndiaye produced a number of striking paintings entitled Rhamb, a Wolof term meaning "spirits of the ancestors" (who ascend from underneath the earth's surface). Unlike works from the Tabaski series, the Rhamb paintings embody Ndiaye's links with the primeval myths of Africa. Here, the language he uses as a painter verges on the abstract. The works which form part of the Le cri d'un continent series (The Scream of a Continent)—including the fine painting which refers to Portrait of Juan de Pareja by Velasquez—address socio-political themes to a greater degree than any other of his works. Simply put, they deal with the problems of the black man living in a world dominated by whites. Nevertheless, these paintings are not commentaries on a given situation, but rather, symbolic transpositions of the artist's feelings about life. The first Paysages originate from Ndiaye's winter sojourn in Mali, the land of the Dogon, in 1970 through 1971. These landscapes...