As if driven to return to the very source, to the origins and development of African art, Ousmane Sow's work might well appear to be a contemporary digest, an exaggerated vision of a long forgotten history. Following the example of the first ancient and classical art of the African continent - the large, terracotta figurative statues of the Nok culture of Nigeria, as mute and as hallucinated as the Easter Island statues - Ousmane Sow began by kneading the earth. A new creative force seeking to build up an improbable army of the shadows, Sow raised his Golem warriors by perfecting an alchemist's mixture of his own concoction. His esthetic of secrecy corresponded exactly with his esthetic of initiation.
How can you think of reproduction when you are striving to produce? Transmutation into bronze - completely hypothetical at that moment - would have been considered as a vulgar and flashy transformation of clay into gold.

It's a mistake to attribute to primary works of art an originality that cannot be reproduced.
We know that as early as the 11th century the ancient Ife civilization in the Yoruba lands, in the south-west of modern Nigeria had discovered how to cast, having already achieved remarkable mastery of terracotta modeling.

But the experiment would have soon ended if the artist had not discovered, first with fascination, then astonishment and emotion, a regeneration and a real metamorphosis in his work. As we know, in the end replicants always escape from their creator…

…For his first three bronzes, Ousmane Sow immediately turned to his earliest works: Dancer with Short Hair and the Standing Wrestler from the Nuba series, and "Mother and Child" from the Masai series. Perhaps the most brutal, in any case the most nude and undeniably the most alive, even though they remain imbued with a sense of moderation, restraint and self control that we associate with the Yoruba and the Fulani.

In the remote Kordofan region, in the south of Sudan, where the Nuba survive and still live, young virgins dance the myertum, the "dance of love". They move closer and closer to the victorious wrestlers, who sit in a circle their eyes lowered, after the annual ceremonial combat. They smear their bodies with black or red earth to make them more athletic and desirable. Only bronze, with its dark, shimmering patina, could recreate the initial erotic gleam of the Dancer with Short Hair, her oblique, hollowed highlights, her supple, animal power. With the Standing Wrestler the bronze makes him stronger, stockier, more concentrated, more violent. He's certainly less human, standing there, one solid block, like a god, a force in motion. The mask he has skillfully painted on his face to frighten his opponents - here etched in green acid in the very flesh of the bronze - acquires a virulence that is closer to actual Nuba war paint, made from charcoal dust and crushed shell.
Contrary to the original human creations, they demand a resurrection of the flesh, a touch of eternity as opposed to a rotting straw…
And the mother breastfeeding her child with her dress and clothing melting into the flesh is here transformed into Maternity. Emerging like a lotus flower from the folds of clothing, colored warm ochre by nitrates, the young woman's head, shaven, smooth and burnt dark by the sun, takes on a Buddha-like grace. Her feet, however, deformed as in Picasso's cubist manner, coarsely hacked as Baselitz might have done, remind us in an immediate, clear and perceptible fashion of the wounds and shocks that African feet suffer from their endless walking.
Ousmane Sow is certainly not the first to color his bronzes. Giacometti and Germaine Richter experimented with it before him, but as a game, a fad, a whim, rarely out of necessity. For the Senegalese, Sow, bronze is inconceivable without color, which is its mask, its interior adornment.
With Ousmane Sow, it's the Africa of bronze and gold, proud and heroic, that comes to life under a beating sun.

Emmanuel Daydé