Dense Lives
	I was told this is a true story. At the beginning of summer, a sculptor, who works in a yard where children play, takes delivery of a block of raw marble. After the holidays a little girl looks at the completed sculpture and asks, "How did you know there was a horse in the stone?" The first time that I saw Ousmane Sow's Wrestlers, their strength, their presence, their organic composition, both earthy and synthetic, magma, a lattice work of straw and rusty roots, I thought that he must have drawn them out of the soil, in one piece, ready made. It was as if they had been deposited in the soil of Africa by some unknown process of sedimentation. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that their empty forms, their moulds could be found around the studio, with other beings developing within them; that the earth "rendered human" was rising like dough. And yet the human expression is so powerful, the sculptor's physical imprint so tactile and sensual, that the opposite becomes obvious: these bodies could only have been kneaded and raised by a human hand. Heightened, pregnant with ancestral anger, alive with motion yet serene, full of internal tension. Rough, archaic and yet so physical, stamped with a plastic nobility that endows mud with the gravity of bronze, Ousmane Sow's sculptures tell of the permanence of Man, his body, his desires and his dreams. And yet through their presence, which is so earthy and physical, an echo of something spiritual can be heard. It's probably because Ousmane Sow opens his arms, his eyes, his heart one hundred and eighty degrees that in his work there is something that can only be described as the unity of opposites: some complex, mysterious ability to arouse one sensation and, equally strongly, its opposite. So this sensation of these creatures coming from elsewhere, of being born far away, in another culture, and yet seeming to us intensely familiar, would have been felt by the Olmecs, the inhabitants of the Gargas grotto, or Guido Mazzoni. In each of these faces some individual characteristic (the profoundness of the gaze, the architecture of the skeleton, the curve of the lips…) suggests the disturbing personalization of a portrait. Yet it is this very uniqueness which seems to say, "This is a man and also "Man" in all his majesty. It's as if the whole community breathed, pulsed and lived in each one of them. The same goes for their attitudes and their gestures, at once simple and familiar, but cleansed of any trivia. It is the movement itself that becomes form, a sturdy presence, internalised, heavy with gravity. Signs of everyday existence become immortal. Ousmane Sow does not travel that narrow, asthmatic corridor, where one is reduced to telling one's own immediate and material history. He arrives from Senegal bringing fresh life, a scale that I might label monumental, except - that unity of opposites again - these are not monuments.
	Ernest Pignon-Ernest