Siriki Ky

born in 1953, lives and works in Burkina Faso and France

Although KY Siriki spends most of his time in Paris and is therefore familiar with the latest setbacks in the art of his time, he is so emotionally and biologically shaped by his homeland that he has never refrained from including it in the twists and turns of his career. And he has done so without opting for illustration or exotic sentimentality, but with a great variety of approaches and an imagination that mark the liberation of his identity, far from inappropriate imitations.

Through the expressiveness of his transformations, his art sometimes represents in a rather barbaric way, sometimes it erases the anecdote, sometimes it dilutes it amidst the buried roots of his mythology, which is at the same time the history of his people, whose essence he successfully brings to life. Colored box fragments, decorative motifs, anthropomorphic reliefs, barely retouched turned woods engraved with mysterious signs or wrapped in fabric, suggested torsos in gilded metal with corroded outer skin, totem columns in the shape of vases or rigorously worked faces chant a hymn to man and life.

A life that he wants to formulate in its raw state, with its original attributes infused in the incessant metamorphoses of his subjects. Far from any imitation, it is therefore the natural force that emanates from his structures and their testimonial content, the synthesis of their contrasting forms and their extremely simplified distribution, the complementarity of the smallest accidents that make up the surface and the hieratic breath of the fittings that give the intimate and at the same time monumental work of KY Siriki the efficiency of its order and its sublimating power.

Gerard XURIGUERA
Art critic