OUSMANE BÂ

Ousmane Bâ considers the act of painting as a liberation, breaking the constraints of gravity, both physical and symbolic. He creates spaces where bodies are freed from all burdens and moral and identity constraints to flourish in movement, weightlessness, and abandonment.

The body is depicted in suspended motion, frozen between effort and transcendence, between obligation and liberation, expressing an inherent suffering imbued with liberating ecstasy. The weightless silhouettes are tense, arched and enveloping, intertwined. The search for hyper-expressionist postures appears at the heart of the artist's approach.

For Ousmane Bâ, antigravity is revealed as a metaphor evoking the weight of African identity, but expressed with a certain lightness. These figures embody resilience. They are flayed figures straight out of Renaissance paintings, raw bodies, bare skin, wounded or recumbent figures contemporary with the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Yet they float with extraordinary ease and grace. With a certain carefreeness, from a dance step to amorous ecstasy, the liberated body expresses life in all its magnificence.
Ousmane Bâ invites us to transcend our memories and heritage, to project ourselves lightly into our changing world.

 Living in Tokyo since 2019, his compositions are created using Sumi ink, Japanese natural pigments, and Japanese washi paper, revealing the artist's long-time interest in the art of calligraphy as well as Japanese printmaking techniques, including "Moku Hanga" and "Shodo."
Ousmane Bâ displays a great mastery of drawing the human body. Supported by extensive research and ink sketches, he directly cuts out the body lines from the pictorial material. He assembles and articulates the limbs to recompose these bodies and suspend their tension in their final state.