Portrait: Alhassane Konté, promising Malian painter
Alhassane Konté, “Le taureau bleu”, 2020, exhibited in Abidjan, at LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery.
© Personal archives Alahassane Konté
Text by: Sabine Cessou Follow
5 mins
“Lass”, his artist name, multiplies exhibitions in Africa and Europe.
He asserts his original style in a new series of candid paintings featuring animals, flowers and children.
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This 27-year-old plastic artist, whose studio is in Kalabankoro in Bamako, is on imminent take-off.
His problem, rare enough to be mentioned, is keeping enough works to display them, and not selling them too quickly.
He exhibits both at LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery in Abidjan, at the Montevideo center in Marseille, as part of the Africa France 2020 season and at Mémoires Africaines in Sally, Senegal.
His paintings were shown in 2020 in Paris for the first time by Galerie Chauvy, and other works will soon be hung in Mali and Luxembourg.
The influences of Amadou Sanogo and Malick Sidibé
Lass grew up “in the village”, near Kayes, in a traditional Soninké family, before going to devote himself to his passion and study in Bamako. A graduate in sculpture from the National Institute of Arts, he then trained in visual arts at the Conservatory of multimedia arts and crafts of Balla Fasséké Kouyaté.
He was first influenced by the work of his elder Amadou Sanogo, a safe bet at the Magnin-A gallery.
He then explored new avenues, on the advice of two great contemporary artists, Soly Cissé and Barthélémy Toguo, lavished during the festival on the Niger in Ségou.
In large formats, he began to revisit around fifty portraits of the youth of the 1960s by photographer Malick Sidibé.
On these colorful compositions, he sticks playing cards - an inspiration that came by chance, a card having stuck one day on a canvas he did not like, and which he had put to dry in his yard.
Alhassane Konté known as “Lass” in front of one of his works, exhibited until July 23, 2021 at the Montevidéo space in Marseille.
© Sabine Cessou / RFI
His new series, no less prolific, features children, flowers and animals on a green background. It seduces for its freshness, its poetry, its play of colors and its unique style. Started in 2019 during a residency at the Blachère Foundation in Somone, Senegal, she is now going like hot cakes. The message may seem naive, it is nonetheless profound, in connection with the dangers of climate change, but also with the so-called “animist” culture of West Africa, in which the relationship with nature is central.
“
Animals symbolize the obstacles, the difficulties that always exist in life,”
explains Lass.
Children do not touch the ground in my paintings, they are free and natural beings.
They see animals as friends, or try to tame them.
The power of the blue bull for example can be controlled, we can use it.
"
The best of worlds
Lass had already started this series before Amédé Mulin, architect and curator, a former Revue noire based in West Africa, organized the group exhibition
Brave New World
(May 20 to July 3, 2021 ) at LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery in Abidjan. "
The conditions imposed by the pandemic prompted me to reread Brave New
World
, a dystopia written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley, which warns us of the dangers of hyperconsumption and authoritarian abuses
», Explains Amédé Mulin, who regularly collaborates with LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery.
Lass, Ange Dakouo, and Dramane Diarra, from the Tim'Arts collective founded in 2014, as well as Dramane Bamana (Sanou'Art collective) read the book and discussed it.
An exhibition came out, with rather optimistic messages.
Lass thus shows these “good savages” who remained in the jungle, apart from the world order described by Aldous Huxley.
"
Humans who know sharing, peace and joy, in contrast to a world state of dehumanized people who hate nature and no longer communicate with each other,
" explains the artist.
It is not forbidden to read there a sign of the incompressible hope of the generation of Lass, despite the horrors of the crises that have raged in Mali for almost a decade.
Among his projects is a residency with the artist he admires the most, Sadikou Oukpedjo, Togolese plastic artist exhibited by Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Abidjan.
In all simplicity, Lass intends to continue its momentum, "to
keep what is natural and human
" and to see more and more people take an interest in his work.
Alhassane Konté, “La biche rose”, 2021, exhibited in Abidjan, at LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery.
© Personal archives Alahassane Konté
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