Blancheur rigide dérisoire en opposition au ciel

Cheikh Ndiaye
Born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1970.
He lives and works in Dakar, New York, USA , and Lyon, France.

Cheikh Ndiaye uses painting, installation, photography, and film to register the afterlives of objects and buildings. A series of paintings that he began in 2011 features African cinemas with modernist designs that broke radically from both colonialist architecture and local architectural vernaculars. Ndiaye renders the deterioration of these buildings, which have since fallen into disrepair, with warmly lustered tones and in tightly framed angles that recall film stills or picture postcards. Their oblique perspective draws the eye to street level, to the living, flexible spaces that have since grafted onto the disused sites—an exterior wall that becomes a support for a food stall or a temporary shelter—to show how communities refashion cities continuously to suit their lives, their values, and their informal economies.
In his new work Blancheur rigide dérisoire en opposition au ciel (Rigid Derisory Whiteness in Opposition to the Sky), a phrase quoted from a poem by Stephane Mallarme (1842– 1898), Ndiaye paints a thick white border along the bottom of various, seemingly anachronistic, objects, among them a globe, a periscope, a hut, and wooden poles. The white paint alludes subtly to the lime often used by some colonialists to demarcate certain exterior places. These whitewashed spaces rendered black bodies more visible and, for Ndiaye, became yet another perverse mechanism of surveillance and control. In his expansive installation, white becomes an allegory to explore estrangement and self-perpetuating logics of domination. The functions of these objects are irrelevant, even effaced, in service of a rigid, if arbitrary color schema. Ndiaye hints at the physical remnants of colonialism that, as their blanched facades slowly crumble and fade, are voided of their power.