N'doye Douts
Born in 1973, works and lives in Dakar, Senegal
N’doye Douts is part of the prestigious group of renowned artists trained at the National School of Arts in Dakar, from which he graduated in 1999, after an impressive curriculum.
He quickly distinguished himself in various workshops or biennials and the screening of his short film entitled Train-Train Medina, which evokes the construction and fragile de-construction of a city on sand. This film allowed him to become well-known. Ndoye Douts is also a sculptor but Painting, however, remains his favorite discipline.
He quickly acquired international recognition after participating in a few prestigious residencies in France. His participation in “Africa Remix” at the Pompidou Centre (Paris) in 2005 gave him his consecration. His works are exhibited throughout the world, particularly in the USA, Europe, South Africa, and Korea.
He has been producing large-scale productions and recently an installation for the biennale of Dakar. Yet N’Doye remains humble and available and it is in all simplicity that he received Ilab-design and allowed us to better understand his approach.
His work – which could be described as naive and colorful – is inspired by a neighborhood of Dakar, the Medina, a veritable maze of disorderly streets where all types of vehicles circulate. In this environment, the streets are bordered by wires with dry linen hanging, telephone antennas reaching the skies. The houses seem entangled: heaps of debris litter the floor showing the surrounding poverty of the city which is built with rudimentary materials such as corrugated iron, cardboard mud huts. The chaos he depicts illustrates the ingenuity of man living in these soulless urban cities.
Ilab-design was seduced by the pictorial language of N’Doye. From the top of the building where his studio is, the artist is a silent observer who listens and feels the living city recording its soul and vibe. The whirlwind of the city and the mingling of multiple cultures in an urban environment have often challenged him: “How do people live in such neighborhoods”? And it is precisely to this question that his work tries to answer: his painting explores and transfigures these variegated entanglements of forms, materials, and colors, the reciprocal contaminations of architecture and life where the lines surrounding the city stretch and seem to float in space.