Sanou Oumar

PL. 34 Afrolyte, 2021

PL. 35 Trust, 2021

62 Though both artists draw abstract symbolic configurations, Mukendi’s desire to reach a vast number of people through drawing is somewhat opposite to that of the Burkinabé artist Sanou Oumar (b. 1986, bobo-DiouLasso, burKina faso), whose drawing practice is focused inward. Shortly before high school, Oumar began drawing the architectural details of the modern buildings he saw during his visits to Ouagandogou, Burkina Faso’s capital city, on the back of his notebook. The rectilinear configuration of the buildings and their architectural features gave him positive feelings, similar to the reassuring feeling he experiences while drawing. Although Oumar isn’t involved with a specific spiritual practice, his technique has affinities with those of mystic abstract artists like Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz, as well as his contemporary Johanna Unzueta, all of whom utilize geometric abstraction to explore spiritual ideas or for healing purposes. Oumar employs drawing as a self-healing ritual and as a meditative practice to conjure and relieve the trauma of the past.

Oumar’s astonishing pen on paperboard abstract drawings are so complex that they could be mistaken for digital renderings, but they are drawn entirely by hand. Abstract mental maps of sorts, each element and shape in his elegant geometric surfaces encodes a memory that is only known to the artist. Oumar begins his delicate mandala-like compositions by outlining a large circle— which provides a sort of mental orientation and portal—with a compass after locating the paper’s center. After looking at the blank piece of paper for a sustained period of time—its emptiness allows him to recall past experiences and memories that he revisits as he draws—Oumar grabs a tool and begins to draw. The freedom to create without a premeditated idea and with an “empty mind” is critical to Oumar’s process because, he says, “It is Sanou, it is my hand, my own personal experience collaborating with my hand.”1 That his drawings seesaw between the dialectic of letting the mind drift away and being present in the direct experience of drawing is evident in the blobs of ink that sometimes accumulate in distinct sections of his drawings; like time-markers, they are evidence of the exact moments when his mind wanders away from the act of drawing. He traces the outlines of mundane objects, such as

1 Sanou Oumar, in conversation with the author, November 29, 2021.

a two-by-four, an old vinyl record, a star-shaped container lid, or a metal semicircle—collected while commuting between his home and studio—to create his compositions and forms. Usually accomplished in one sitting after many hours of focused attention, Oumar’s drawings are constructed one laborious line at a time, “encoding the ordinary into precepts of cosmic equipoise.”2

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2 Zack Hatfield, “Critics’ Picks: Sanou Oumar,” Artforum, April 07, 2021, https:// www.artforum.com/picks/sanou-oumar-85428.

PL. 36 9/16/21, 2021

PL. 37 7/3/21, 2021