For Saïdou Dicko, the horizon is not a line but an experience. A mental space rather than a geographical point. In Where earth and sky meetIn his third solo exhibition at AFIKARIS, the Burkinabè artist continues a deeply autobiographical body of work, nourished by childhood, travel, and a keen attention to the world's elemental forms. It all begins with a simple gesture: walking. Walking to understand. Walking to see how far the gaze can reach.
Dicko was a shepherd from the age of four. Every day, he walked toward the line where, he believed, the earth would eventually touch the sky. He would never reach this mythical point, but this impossible quest became the foundation of all his work. The exhibition is organized around this fundamental tension: between the desire for elevation and the acceptance of limitations, between ambition and learning. The horizon is no longer a promise of conquest but a fragile, poetic space, where failure is transformed into wisdom.
The figures that inhabit Saïdou Dicko's works are silhouettes of children, often painted in black, featureless, without assignable identity. Shadows. Not absences, but full presences, born from the overwhelming light of the Sahel. For him, shadow is refuge, memory, shared territory. It has no age, no gender, no nationality. By erasing faces, Dicko removes nothing: on the contrary, he opens a universal space, where everyone can project themselves.
These children play, dance, stretch out their arms, imitate birds. Their gestures are simple, almost primal. Yet everything seems imbued with a desire to take flight. A jerrycan becomes an airplane, a branch transforms into a wing, a tree offers its shade as shelter. Childhood here is never nostalgic: it is a state of alertness, a moment when imagination supplants reality. To rise above does not mean to flee, but to learn to see differently.
Color plays a central role in this exhibition. African fabrics, cut, recomposed, and digitally integrated into photographs, are never merely decorative. They form inner landscapes, made of memories, travels, and sensations. Photography, watercolor, collage, and digital media blend seamlessly without hierarchy. Dicko, in fact, defines himself less as a photographer than as a visual artist, weaving his images thread by thread, gesture by gesture.
Through this new series, Where earth and sky meet It appears as a meditation on movement. Nothing is fixed. The works tell the story of a circulating memory, a constant back and forth between Africa and Europe, between past and present, between the visible and the invisible. The horizon line is not a destination, but a place of learning, where one understands that what matters is not arriving, but moving forward.
Dicko invites us to slow down, to relearn how to inhabit the world with humility. To accept not reaching for the sky, in order to better listen to the earth. To be, in his own words, "a student of life and a pupil of nature." A discreet but essential lesson in a world saturated with images and certainties.
Saïdou Dicko, Where Earth and Sky Meet
From January 10 to February 28, 2026
AFIKARIS Gallery
7 rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, 75003 Paris
Tuesday to Saturday, 11am–19pm
