Modou Dieng Yacine | A Postcolonial Landscape | Viewing Room
Modou Dieng Yacine, Cosmic Feelings, 2020, acrylic paint, ink, oil stick, collage on canvas, 48 x 72"
Inquire >
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present A Postcolonial Landscape by Modou Dieng Yacine, featuring paintings that explore themes of Black representation and erasure in a globalized society. Dieng reimagines his own experience through dazzling, idiosyncratic mixed media artworks that engage in dialogue with personal narratives and Eurocentric art history.
Modou Dieng Yacine, Blacktarget, 2020, acrylic paint, ink, oil stick, collage on canvas, 72 x 60"
Inquire >
Modou Dieng Yacine, Untitled 3, 2020, collage and acrylic paint on cardboard, 21.5 x 26.5"
Inquire >
“I use domesticity, familiarity and architecture of spaces as a kind of stand-in for the body.”
Dieng Yacine incorporates representational and abstract modes of expression in this recent body of work, and in several large-scale paintings, cut-outs reveal exposed, hand-painted stretcher bars that signify the absence of Blackness in the history of painting. Every work contains exuberant lines and brushstrokes that express the artist's intuitive style of mark-making and prismatic color palette through grids, zig-zags, circular loops, and geometric shapes.
Modou Dieng Yacine, Confessions, 2020, acrylic paint, ink, oil stick, collage on canvas, 72 x 96" (diptych: 72 x 48" each)
Inquire >
Painting as A Performative Act
Exploring photography, installation and performance, Dieng Yacine is consistently searching for what it means to be Black in our modern society. Emotion and concept dictate the medium. His paintings – a performative act themselves – ask, “How can one’s imagination be altered?”
Joie de Vivre
The work in this exhibition is a dual representation of the physicality of complex relations and locations presented by being Black in our globalized society, but also of the matrixes of expression, representation, erasure and discovery that compose the abstract metaphysical experience of Blackness. Beyond the larger collective consciousness, they speak to a tracing of
these pathways through a personal history. The visual story of their making mirroring the story of the artist. The story of an upbringing by a colonialist culture in a native land and the paths
taken away from it, both inwardly and outward. Not to detriment, but
joie de vivre. A journey that continues and looks, brightly, forward.
–Modou Dieng Yacine, A Postcolonial Landscape, Artist Statement, 2020
Modou Dieng Yacine, Untitled 1, 2020, collage and acrylic paint on cardboard, 21.5 x 26.5"
Inquire >
Modou Dieng Yacine, Untitled 7, 2020, collage and acrylic paint on cardboard, 20.5 x 15.5"
Inquire >
The title A Postcolonial Landscape alludes to a symbolic location of physical sites and psychological states, an accumulation of Dieng Yacine's experiences beginning in his native Senegal to present day life in the United States. Pictures of anthropological African masks, people, and places, as well as his own photographs, are layered onto the paintings, combinations that reiterate themes of identity, location, and the hand of the artist. Dieng Yacine's brightly colored architectural facades resonate with strength and vulnerability, adorned with stacked windows or undulating, multi-tiered archways that invite the viewer inside the picture frame's imagined interior realm.
Modou Dieng Yacine, Untitled 5, 2020, collage and acrylic paint on cardboard, 15.5 x 20.5"
Inquire >
About the Artist
Modou Dieng Yacine was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal. He is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the symbolic and mythological power of pop culture through mixed media and hybrid materials. His work constructs a mural of archetypal cultural imagery filtered through the perspective of a split identity between Blackness and Western Philosophy. Dieng has exhibited internationally and is the co-founder of Blackpuffin, a curatorial company based in Chicago, Illinois. Dieng holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco, CA).
