According to Sereer’s oral accounts and cosmogony, the world originates from a supreme being named Roog (or Koox in Cangin languages), and its creation is inextricably linked to that of the swamp within which the first trees grew. Symbols of growth and fertility, trees amongst the Sereer (and several other communities) are considered living entities – equal to human beings – and our connection to them and nature, by extension, plays a crucial role in our understanding of humanity.

With a practice deeply informed by a faculty of observing nature, Senegalese visual artist Théodore Diouf has produced large bodies of work evocative of our relationship to nature. Attending various technical and art schools, namely the École des Arts de Dakar in the early 1970s, Diouf acquired several skills in notable disciplines such as sculpture and painting, consolidating the foundations for his artistic journey. As the artist points out in an interview, everything began in Bambilor (a town about 30km away from the capital Dakar), where he was a student and would rush to the forest every morning, meticulously sketching down in his notebook various forms encountered during his solitary wanderings.¹ Both animate and inanimate, these forms evolved throughout time into an abstract and poetic visual language reflective of the artist’s immediate and home environment.

Realized primarily on canvas and paper, using paint and pastel, Diouf’s works portray Senegalese flora’s vivid beaut and essence. Symbols such as that of the snake, representative of pangool (saints and ancestral spirits), recur in some of his paintings, highlighting the artist’s roots in African cosmogonies, particularly the Sereer one. Conscious of preconceived stereotypes surrounding African arts, then and now, Diouf’s works reflect a dynamic interplay of heritage and innovation, in which traditional motifs, symbolism, and techniques found within mask-making, sculpture, and textiles are reinterpreted and merged with modernist aesthetics, abstraction, and political narratives, creating a dialogue between past and present.