Born in Diourbel on October 5, 1957, Kalidou Kasse is a Senegalese artist, painter, weaver and sculptor whose perspective for the legitimization of African contemporary art has given birth to several prize-winning work and exhibitions all over the world. His unique style of threadlike characters in a background of lively and brilliant colours describes a poetic and charming world painted with a constant concern for forms, details and colours. From a historic point of view, he is the artist who has delicately blended and balanced the art of western pictorial with African aesthetics inherited from his family of weavers. By refusing the representation imposed by western art, he reaffirms an individual form that is original in heralding the art of an emerging dominant force unabashed and unfettered by its past. This groundbreaking book explores the foundations of Kasse's aesthetics and subtly traces the individual trajectory of the painter within the wider collective and historic movement of art on the continent and beyond.Jean-Bernard Ouedraogo is a professor of Sociology is currently the Director of Research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France.
He has taught in several universities in Africa, Europe and in North America. He is the author of several works in the field of art in Africa, including Art photographique en Afrique (Harmattan, 2002), Identite visuelle en Afrique (Amalthee, 2008), and Norbert Elias, Ecrits sur l'art africain, (Kime, 2002). From 2002 to 2008, he was Deputy-Executive Secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal.