en pointe (switch legs, left up, around, and reach)

Figure and ornament, line and surface, black and white, human and animal, nature and technology, art and critique – Moussa Kone engages with dichotomies, and simultaneously with their synthesis on both a formal level and in terms of the content. Notions of hierarchical relationships between discourse and the visual, outmoded ascriptions of artistic disciplines or role patterns have made way for a softening of binary structures where no one side is favoured over the other. This also applies in formal terms when Kone engages in his chosen full-time pursuit, drawing. Hard contrasts dominate the fine detailled execution of the Indian ink drawings. His artistic signature has strong characteristics and appears extremely individual, with painstakingly executed, systematically applied rows of penned cross-hatching structuring the image in black-and-white surfaces and completing the composition as a homgenous unity where no one part outweighs another.

In the 30-part series en pointe, faceless ballet dancers balance on simple, abstract, geometric shapes. The shapes executed in black and white are like circles that penetrate pointed triangles and are held in balance by rectangles, structuring the overall image with extreme precision – just like the ballerinas who insist on exercising perfect control over their bodies. They dance on elements with a geometric design reminiscent of Constructivist works, lurching into emptiness to instantaneously stabilise themselves, moving dangerously close to the edge of the abyss while never crossing it.

One shape never dominates the colour, size or geometric design of another; it can still emancipate itself from another shape and develop freely on the background. Kone treats his figures in the same way as one of his geometrical forms: always faceless, so depersonalized and anonymous, they become quasi abstract design elements. They subscribe to a shared whole where it is no longer to be ascertained whether the dancers’ movements and poses are predetermined by the geometric structure or whether they themselves determine the coloring, design and position of the shapes.

The (mutual) interplay between the figurative and the abstract, between line and surface, between positive and negative shapes, between nature and nurture, always remains undecided.

Moussa Kone alludes here to discourses about human identity as a socially disciplined construct. He is interested in the way people “acquire a vocabulary”, subjecting themselves to a training of the body and codes of behaviour that conform to social and physical ascriptions and conventions. His absurd imagery always remains in an unattainable intermediary zone where categories of apparently real space, constructed and imagined identities, oscillate between views outwards and views inwards – as an act of self-questioning and self-perception.

His drawings are narrative without being illustrative, they pose questions without answering them. They frequently seem unfinished, alluding to what Jean-François Lyotard described as “unpresentable” they seem to “... make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.” ¹ “My drawing is like an open system. Some drawings would be too beautiful if I were to finish them. But it often doesn’t take any more to complete the drawing in one’s mind”, ² says Kone. He sees his method of drawing as being related to writing to the extent that “in your mind you have already formulated what you are going to write before you write it.” ³ In fact, Kone’s drawings have nothing expressive and spontaneous about them, nothing automatised or random. He researches meticulously and compiles archives of images, scouring literary, art historical or popular culture sources. Motifs and compositions are freed of their context, often compiled as collages on the computer and then painstakingly executed in Indian ink. Like this, Kone creates conceptual images in an almost ritualised process that provide the viewer with puzzles that she/he attempts to solve with symbolic interpretations.

Text by Fiona Liewehr, Vienna, 2011 (translated from German)

¹ Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?”, translated by G. Bennington & B. Massumi, in: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 10, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1984, p.78.
² Moussa Kone in an interview, from: Johanna Hofleitner, “Geschichten aus der Feder”, in: Die Presse, Schaufenster, 19.6.2009, p.32.
³ Moussa Kone in an interview, from: Michael Huber, “Geistesblitze, gebannt mit Feder und Tusche”, in: Kurier, 2.2.2010, p.26.