MOR FAYE; MAN AND MYTH.
By Nii B. Andrews.
Mor Faye (1946 – 1984) began his artistic career under the patronage of Leopold Senghor – the poet, philosopher, academician and first president of Senegal.
After Faye attended the Ecole des Arts with his colleagues, they then loosely constituted the so called, Ecole de Dakar.
By the mid 70s Faye was experiencing the fallout from the politics of art patronage, cultural nationalism and the downside of his recurrent psychiatric illness.
Several writers have provided important perspectives on Faye.
Some have called him , “artist maudit”; others, a “solitary medicine man”; others have referred to him as an “African saint”.
These characterizations are fraught with problems because they conflate Faye’s impressive modernist skills with a “privileged” European style as a measure of universality and internationalism; at the same time downplaying Faye’s place in a constantly changing and evolving complex local history of art in Dakar.
The reality was that Faye (who studied at the Ecole des Arts under Iba N’Diaye and earned a Masters degree), was one of many other talented and independent minded individuals who moved in and out of official patronage while pursuing their own visions.
After 1976, Faye no longer exhibited his work.
Sadly he died of malaria….malaria (!) on November 6 1984.
At his death, he left over 800 paintings.
Four hundred of these that had never been seen by the public, were rescued by the untiring efforts of Bara Diokane – a Dakar lawyer and Spike Lee and exhibited after a hiatus of fifteen years in Paris January 1991 at Gallerie 39.
Mor Faye spent his entire life in Senegal struggling to survive.
The paradox is that while on admission for his psychiatric illness, the institution afforded him the materials and freedom to create readily.
Through out his career, he created a body of work that included elements which were idyllic, erotic, macabre and whimsical – but always unique and entirely his own.