2025 – Ongoing
Mame-Diarra Niang
Anatomy of a Wave
Anatomy of a Wave

Mame-Diarra Niang, As they conquered the wave, A wave transforms them, At the break, In the middle of the peril, they become, Quadriptych, 2025

The artist writes:

In Anatomy of a Wave the pirogue, the sea and its voyagers become abstracted in an epic traversée: the fleet enters the wave, vanishes, becomes pixel, pulse, vibration, frequency and seismographic trace, before re-emerging again. Across the series, this passage unfolds as a continual movement of submerging and resurfacing, always in motion.

The tableaux arise from a gesture of scanning, where the movement of light and speed creates new images that recall painting, engraving, and photography, yet never fully becoming any of them. Here, time itself becomes material — each line of light both a trace of duration and an act of seeing, a way of turning movement into image. The series, composed of more than one hundred individual works, is fully activated when assembled as a constellation of murals expanding into an immersive field that envelops the viewer.

Unfolding in a monochrome palette, almost entirely devoid of color yet infused with glimmers from the spectrum of light, its sentiment echoes a collective sense of uncertainty. The wave becomes both subject and metaphor: of passage, survival, and transformation — a storm, a moment of tension, an image of what we must all traverse.

Within its surfaces resonate distant visual traditions: from Hokusai's Great Wave to Turner's tempests and Richter's blurs; not as direct references, but as echoes within the data flow. Between the estampe and the pixel, between memory and vibration, these images occupy a space of crossing, giving rise to a new practice of digital impressionism. Ultimately, the work treats time as its true medium — unfolding not only across the image but within it, as if duration itself were sculpted into light.