About Modou .

Born in Saint-louis-Senegal -West Africa

Living in USA

Education : San Francisco Art Institute -MFA

Art presented itself to me as a solution in my quest to find a refuge.

I believed that art was made by exceptional people, in a world of ideas, philosophy and faith. I seek in Art freedom, peace, and beauty.

That is how I became an artist. What always fascinated me about my environment was the city. For me, like art itself, the city is another space of refuge. It is this space that allows me to survive and to evolve. I know how to move around in a city, how to hide, but also how to make myself visible, in its cultural and counter-cultural diversity.

One of my favorite pastimes was always to look at the walls that line central avenues and arteries. I would copy the techniques used and the spaces reserved for advertising, as well as the methods used to attract and hold the public’s attention – graphics, colors… These are the techniques that I use in conjunction with more traditional practices to make my work, from collage to print.

In my mixed media images, I conceptualize and express visions of contemporary life, which is constituted by a mix of humanity and topography, a pastiche of forms. In my work, I evoke the city’s continuously changing façade, as well as the hybrid character of its population by way of eclectic combination. The issues I address deal with urban history, race, social status, gender, cosmopolitanism, and belonging. My collage work comments on both the built environment architecture and the people.

When you look closely at city walls, you’ll notice that juxtaposition, superposition, the assemblage of posters and materials like staples, nails and plastic, all combines to create an aesthetic that is particular to these public spaces and that I use to evoke an urban aesthetic.

These various entities and identities become fractions of my cultural practice and are presented in their modern, functional versions as signifiers of contemporary life. My processes involves integrating everyday objects with which we are all associated in one way or another.

My artistic practice also includes the exploration of different forms and visual movements. In other words, I explore through my painting certain techniques—such as appropriation, sampling and intervention—which first emerged as non-visual forms of urban artistic expression in music and performance.

I dress my paintings according to the latest urban fashions. When I use camouflage, I am evoking both the recent history of the military uniform that is used in the jungles and deserts of combat, but I am also referencing the way in which that camouflage is reintegrated into a space of urban fashion.

My work is both a denunciation and a celebration of our lifestyle. Because we live in a postmodern period, we’ve reached a stage in world history and in our own lives in which art must at the same time serve as a tool for serious aesthetic and visual work but also as a frivolous, useless object of contemplation.

These two sets of values (useful and useless / serious and frivolous) are not irreconcilable; they interact in a constant dialectic, because they inspire, influence and complement one another.

I address these issues through my choice of materials, which are mostly domestic objects. As the critic David Hickey has said, art is cheap but priceless at the same time.

In my most recent series, I bounce a basketball covered in gold, silver or copper ink onto a collage of LP records. To me, music is everything and for everybody, all races, genders, classes and ages. I get my inspiration, energy and memory listening to music. Music transcends and translates what we are, who It is not only the notes, the sounds, the lyrics. It is also the imagery, the hipness, the graphics, the black vinyl quality, the speed. we are.

This latest work is about making prints on vinyl. Adding more layers of prints onto printed music—only this time they are visible. These pieces are music you can’t hear, but you can see. It is like overriding the auditory faculty by the visual senses. Privileging the visual over the oral. It is also a parody of consumption, but also a celebration of consumerism.

More and more, art is increasingly transgressive vis-à-vis society. One might say that art has always played this role, but in a global world where everything is becoming uniform, life is taking on a single dull tone.

In this context, it is essential that art play its role fully. Transgression is more and more visible in the mix of medias, in the will to distance oneself from formal artistic conventions. The tendency is towards an art that marks its desire to dissociate with society and all that this society represents. Forms that appear to celebrate consumer culture take on a tone of denunciation, manifesting a profound discontent.

It is not that conventional imagery is disappearing, rather it is multiplying; in other words, in their multiplication, these formal images now serve to signify not compliance, but defiance. In their superposition, they manifest a need to lead multiple lives. In effect, in today’s global world, we find ourselves faced with the need to lead double or triple lives. One life is no longer enough to satisfy our competing desires.

I find myself as an artist whose every option is double; I am squarely situated between two societies, two cultures, two perceptions. I attempt to force a merger, rather than relegate one of these options to the margins.

The product is this cross-cultural collage, in which the social aligns itself with and becomes accomplice to the philosophical, where practice meets theory. Here one finds both traces of the object’s history and, at the same time, the object in all its agency, actively determining its own story.

There is a juxtaposition between my social and racial history and my means of apprehending the tradition of painting. My pieces establish associations between various elements of differing origin, as well as various stereotypes and techniques which often contradict one another.