But as an African Ousmane is African deep down. And more than this, from Senegal, the Greece of Africa, he has in his genes the memory of the cavalcades and forays into the burning savanna which his grandmother and great grandfather with the 'cedos' were part of, these devil's horsemen of the royal armies. Beyond this latent noise and fury, he has a language inspired by the griot, this epic inspiration of Homeric narrative, a taste for living myth, which is tangible and which one seeks to touch with one's fingers and eyes. Becoming a wise old man is not something that comes without a price in a continent where the dominant art form remains sculpture. This is sculpture on a human scale, which you can take with you, without an outline sketch, without a preliminary design or preparatory drawing, which is a product of the artist's dexterity alone, whose responsibility is to give meaning to matter. An inspired art which transcends models. As we know, African sculpture is word become form. "I love telling stories", confesses Ousmane Sow. But far from evoking any anecdote, his figures, like the powerful Buveur de Sang [Blood drinker] and Buffle [Buffalo] belong to the Masai - a black double of the Cretan bull - these are black gods in action. Spiritual bodies. Souls reconstituted from waste flesh. Mud, metal and straw Golems, bodies innervated with life, warriors of the tropical night which may occasionally play the part of wine-rack scarecrow.
The group portraits created by Ousmane Sow, since his first Noubas - derived from the shock of the dance and trance photos of a Leni Riefenstahl returned from her odes to the gods of the Hitler stadium - in their own way meet the criteria of the art of the dark continent. While the size of his work, which is unusual for African statuary, is often larger than two and a half meters, it should be remembered that Sow himself is 1m 80 tall. And although he has produced series of sculptures of almost hallucinatory realism of the Zulus and Masai, he has never felt the need to visit these people he does not know.
"I represent man, that is all," he says. "I allow the images to be born by themselves". From the peoples of Africa to the American Indians, he seeks the fluidity of these men standing, who "care about their bodies, have a feel for body paint and venerate their sorcerers". As though for him, it was a question of filling the gaps in African art, and to provide a mirror image for these proud and aesthetic nomad ethnic groups in the form of this sedentary art which they are lacking - i.e. sculpture. And he goes still further, and sculpts movement through men who never refrain from movement….
One should no longer be surprised by his passionate, even brutal interest in the American Indians. Moving from one continent to another, as was the case with history through slavery, in the New World replacing a dead Indian with an uprooted black man reduced to the condition of a beast of burden, Ousmane Sow pays homage in his last, powerful creation, to the last warriors under the same sun. They too are "men of color", the free Sioux and Cheyenne red-skins of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Two Moon and Gall are lined up for one last time in the battle of Little Big Horn, against the rage of white destruction. As though the genocide, initiated from Gorée, the mythical island of the slave trade,
opposite Dakar, had found in this some kind of conclusion. This first - and last - resounding victory, was in fact the prelude to a total war and systematic elimination of the Indian race on the part of the American authorities who had barely just abolished slavery. Although Ousmane Sow chose to deal with the very heart of the combat, evoking the terrifying hand-to hand combat, the only kind of fighting worthy of the name in the eyes of the Indians, he has given these scenes of carnage a gravity and religiosity far from any tendency towards the merely spectacular. And much more than the Charge of the Light Brigade or some Technicolor Western film, it is Picasso's Guernica that comes to mind when facing those soldiers of the earth in the throes of their death ritual, or these piles of wounded horses their heads thrown back in a protracted braying against death. An immense frozen cry, set in color and in pain, the whole battle is perhaps embodied in the distant, lost gaze of Sitting Bull, the medicine man, sorcerer, also apart from the events, and in prayer.
As an artist-healer, and former physiotherapist, as we have discussed, Ousmane Sow sculpts in the same way he cared for people. By pressing and bandaging, protractedly massaging to the extent of bringing to life and bringing back to life. Sculpting for him becomes a caress. One should see him in his workshop-courtyard in the full Dakar sunlight, slowly kneading a strange unctuous paste between his large brown chiseled hands, a heavyish promethean half-chocolate clay, which he applies with daubed cloths onto a metal framework covered with synthetic straw. Such a simple but magical mixture, achieved from scraps of adulterated glue, and which he has macerated for years with twenty or so other products, enables him to achieve all kinds of daring, subtle, brutal effects and all kinds of colors and smells. As in the ancient African ritual sculptures made using techniques involving soaking in mud, an oil or beeswax patina, and sacrificial cuisine, mixing blood and beer.
Besides, like these anonymous creators of arts which are coyly referred to as the "first", who created their works in secret, Ousmane Sow obstinately refuses to reveal the constituents of his mixture. As he never likes to open the door to his workshop so long as he feels that his sculptures have not been bestowed with their essence. These all too human creatures are not likenesses but enigmas. Violent interrogations that dance on the edge of night. They leave it to the spectator to break the circle and join in the prayer.