By painting
common interiors, scenes of cafes or banal restaurants, the French artist
Baye-Dam Cisé, alias Rakajoo, plays with the most normal situations. Thus, when
he paints a woman seated in front of a coffee table, the character, whose first
name is unknown, constitutes the real center of the painting. Is she waiting
for someone or is she alone, as if taken out of her thoughts by the painter's interuption?
The gaze of this modern-day Pre-Raphaelite Madonna makes one think, as often in
Rajakoo's paintings, of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, where
all of a sudden space anamorphoses and becomes purely conceptual. The framing
is relatively tight and in this raises the question of the presence. More than
waiting for another person, here the character is having a drink alone, in a
solitude that makes all other interveners erase themselves, or put them at a
distance, including the spectator.

References
to classical painting are omnipresent in Rakajoo's work. He likes to tell
stories as he says. But his story is without narration, it is more of a
continuity with the history of art. Moreover, from the history of art he draws
not only references but also his technique. The work of preparing the canvas
responds, in the manner of the old masters, to a desire to capture the light,
the light of the scene as well as that of the character portrayed. Before even
starting to paint with precision, Rakajoo prepares his canvas with a red
background on which he roughly sketches the outlines of his characters. The
choice of tones close to red to prepare the background of his canvases is not
trivial. Indeed, they are neutral colors located in the middle of the spectrum.
They make it possible to find the right balance of light with the colors which
will then be applied on top and bring all the scene to life as well as all
these emotions that make it work.

Rakajoo
(aka Baye-Dam Cissé), 35, is an emerging talent of the French scene. Versatile,
self-taught, the artist was first spotted in 2008 on the occasion of the
inauguration of the monumental 300 square meter fresco he had just produced for
his Aubervilliers boxing club. He was then invited to present an exhibition for
the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. This was
the starting point of his career as a painter, which led him to participate in
various group exhibitions such as at the Blachère Foundation in 2012 or at the
National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris in 2015 where he
questioned the notion of migration. In 2019, he joined the Kourtajmé art school
founded by artist JR and award-winning director Ladj Ly. Various group
exhibitions followed, such as the one at the Palais de Tokyo in 2020, then at
the Société Générale Foundation. In March 2021, he was invited to make his
first solo show at the Danysz gallery in Paris.