Culture guest – With “Saytu”, the artist Alioune Diagne paints what disappears

The 40-year-old artist traveled the center and southeast of his country, Sénégalmeeting minority communities: Bassari, Bédik, Dialonké and Coniagui. Among these ethnic groups living in isolated villages in Etiolo, Ibel, Iwol, Andjel, Madina Baffé, he observed rituals, ceremonies and forms of transmission, today weakened by the social and cultural changes of the contemporary world. Certain practices are gradually disappearing.

His project is based less on a documentary logic than on a plastic translation. Alioune Diagne reinterprets these experiences through his system of “unconscious signs“, an accumulation of pictorial modules close to Western pointillism which structures all of his compositions. From a distance, the scenes appear clearly. As the gaze approaches, they fragment into a multitude of autonomous signs.

Masks, dances, songs, costumes and ceremonies become vibrant surfaces in which abstraction and figuration mix. Certain works, like The Bassari girldeliver themselves immediately. Others, like Under the sacred tree et The dancing crowdrequire a more attentive look.

The exhibition is part of a reflection on memory and the circulation of knowledge in the era of globalization. For Alioune Diagne, painting is an archive tool as much as a space of transformation. Her interest in feminine rituals and their forms of transmission runs through several of her recent works, notably The first line et Dialonké rhythm.

Influenced by the practice of his grandfather, a Koranic master, the Senegalese artist develops a visual language thought of as a system of universal signs. A way for Alioune Diagne to fix what still remains, before disappearance.

Alioune Diagne, exposition « Saytu » at the Galerie Templon until July 18, 2026