"Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; The Wet Eyes Of The Sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

The Wet Eyes of the Sentimentalist tackles the relationship between portraiture and nostalgia, violence and sentimentality. On the base of ethnographic photographs, this series deconstructs the aesthetic habit of consuming, re/producing and preserving the violence of colonial imagery and archives. By means of copying, cutting, washing, sowing and interlacing, the artist distorts, re-imagines and re-creates segments of these images as large-scale portraits.

Excerpt from exhibition text by Paz Guevara and Dior Thiam

2021, in: This Bridge Can Get Us There, Savvy Contemporary/Archive Sites, curated by Chiara Figone, Paz Guevara and Beta Othmani)
2022, in: Pour un Soir, Keur Muus, Dakar Biennale OFF, curated by Wagane Gueye