Boly Sambo

Sambo BOLY is a Peul born in 1960 in Burkina Faso. He did his apprenticeship in art at the National Center of Arts and Crafts (CNAA) of Ouagadougou. On the city's expanding art scene, he is developing a technique inspired by the colors of the Sahel.

Excerpts from Stéphane Eliard's book "Contemporary art in Burkina Faso" Editions L'Harmattan

(...) The world of Sambo Boly is that of tradition, but by its sometimes critical distance, by its freedom of tone and the originality of its plastic language, it gives to his works a range offset from the frame. (...) Formally his painting belongs only to him and, contrary to what happens generally - especially in the field of abstraction - it is impossible to find in Burkina Faso an artist who could have influenced the work of Sambo Boly, or even be influenced by him. (...) The work of Sambo Boly may seem coded and inaccessible to the foreign amateur. But its success proves that by going through the particularism, even the anecdotal, it poses in fact very general questions that agitate the spirit of men in Peul villages as much as in the major Western capitals.