Modou Dieng Yacine Uses Rhythm to Integrate Absence and Identity

Modou Dieng Yacine’s latest series, Untitled Protagonist, asks for more time with you. Vacant figures courageously face obscurity, and silhouettes recontextualize heroism. Collage-textured surfaces represent temporality under bodies composed with zooming color. 

Bold blurs bounce rhythmically to add textural weight to Yacine’s subjects. On top of his textured canvases, history is assembled in layers of foreground, middle ground, and background. Ultimately, the Untitled works from his “Protagonist Series” rely on translating emotion into rhythm thereby referencing asymmetrical parallelism — an idea coined by Senegal’s first president and poet, Léopold Sédar Senghor.

Asymmetrical Parallelism is a syncopated, Sahelian-style of design that aligns with modernism. It raises rhythm as principally equal to form. Seen in the works of Senegalese architects such as Cheikh N’Gom and Pierre Goudiaby Atepa, rhythm serves to balance scale and materiality.

Similar to Saido Dicko’s black bodies juxtaposed with rhythmic fabric; Yacine’s works make like heat maps to frame rhythm. Both artists use absence to highlight identity as a canvas-like subjecthood that speaks in questions. “Do you see me?” “What’s your name?”  “Are you paying attention to what’s going on?” By posing these questions, Yacine’s pieces address intricate truths complicated by colonial history.

“Having grown up in Senegal is a different experience and way of understanding the world,” Yacine said. “Now I’m getting more and more focused on architecture, our way of living, and how the body gives space to place and integrates into a conversation with the architecture.”

His conceptual pieces begin by treating the canvas as an architectural edifice that he domesticizes, introducing unfamiliar materials into it. The final step in his process is discerning when to leave a piece. Yacine mentioned that Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s elegant abstract pieces inform the way he blends pain and struggle into his work.

Merging abstraction with asymmetrical parallelism translates fission to speak the language of dynamic rhythm. Interpersonal and geopolitical conflicts are instruments that sing the tune of division, decay, and defeat, generating local rhythms over time. Yacine’s practice was initially interested in understanding the rhythm of the 1960s post-war generation. 

By either an ocean of time or the ocean itself, the questions asked by Yacine’s works are noticeably out of reach. He situates identity with visibility. Ronald Jackson uses distance with foliage masks, which reference camouflage. Both artists play with patterns as motifs for shifting visibility, which underscores otherness as a characteristic of Blackness.

He moved from Saint-Louis, Senegal, to San Francisco, California, to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. Yacine has spanned the academic gamut, also earning an MFA at the School of Fine Arts in Dakar, Senegal. He also directed the Department of Arts and Painting for a decade at the Pacific Northwestern College of Art in Portland, Oregon.

His work dances with expectations of cultural heroism and poses an alternative to Western competitive ideals. To win as a Black person means working twice as hard for half the results. Afro-diasporic cultural subversion warps success by realizing that Black success claims self-sacrifice for cursory reward. In this way, distance from success brings selfhood into a sensitive presence.

By either an ocean of time or the ocean itself, the answers asked by Yacine’s works are noticeably out of reach. In this way, he uses visible identity to pose distance. Ronald Jackson uses distance with foliage masks, which reference camouflage. Both artists play with patterns as motifs to shift visibility, underscoring the otherness characteristic of a Black phenomenon.

Working “twice as hard” comes from overcoming structural inequality that underscores Black life. The effort of losing transcends the goalposts of a Western win for Black people throughout the diaspora. 

“Heroism comes to a place when we talk about who you are as a community as a people,” Yacine said in a phone interview. We finally live in a time when we can talk about Africanness and Blackness and point out our heroes. It’s important we do that.” 

Yacine’s work illustrates conflict and leverages how loving the game, not the win, empowers all players. In Yacine’s world, the winner doesn’t take it all because the loser isn’t stripped of their value for losing. The game is Sisyphean. Palpable, paint-thick pain populates Yacine’s pieces and arrests attention to abstract our association with achievement. 

His work spotlights camaraderie as a platonic ideal that distributes victory’s fruit to all its contenders. War, genocide, and structural inequality complicate his work by grounding territorial and cultural disputes as more than games in real life. Western underdevelopment of the continent isn’t a trivial game, as cultures, ecosystems, and lives weigh in the balance of real-world conflicts.

All parts of his life quilt his worldview. Growing up in a time when there weren’t celebrated Black heroes, Yacine expresses, through his work, the cultural pressure to succeed as marginalized people recognize that they wear culture like skin. It’s the idea that Black people aren’t allowed to fail. Untitled Heroes reconciles how Blackness is a reason for being seen as both sub- and super-human and places distance between the body and the onlooker for security.

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