An avid reader since childhood, literature, philosophy and the dialectics of language play a major role in Sess Essoh's life and work. He links history, sociology, and imagination to his art to focus his ideas on the places and means of achieving an ideal and liberation both tangible and longed for.
Fascinated by his father's practice of recording his daily life in a diary, he turned his attention to literature and history while he became fascinated by the celebrations and traditional rites of his community. His later confrontation with the urban world of Abidjan will challenge his achievements and blunt his certainties. He discovers a restless, unjust and too often violent world. He mingles with a multicultural youth who manages to recode its universe with singular narratives that surprise him as much as they reveal the diversity of feelings and interpretations. Strengthened by these experiences, a more rebellious path is unveiled to him, inscribed in the use of poetry and writing which naturally bring his interrogations in the critical analysis of the society witnessing the erosion of positivism but also of the falsification of History.
The addition of knowledge, learning and questioning is formalized through collages and the contribution of golden leaves or colored crepons, the forms dialogue with the signs, whether they are alphabetical or from ancient traditions, in a chatter calling the spectator to doubt his knowledge and to challenge his certainties.
A provocative pedagogy, the sequencing of his production in episodes aims to dramatize an imaginary but symbolic society of our world, such as a parody of the Human Comedy. His characters are the evocation of caricatured figures, thus the "Plaster Men" represent ordinary people exposed to corruption and mediocrity, while the "Cardinals" are the masters of time, immortals and arbiters of this great comedy. In his latest series "Origin of a Cardinal", they take on the image of iconic figures who have marked the history of the Continent, in dialogue with shadowy figures awaiting their rehabilitation.
Times have not changed, everything seems to have stopped, except for the great chatter scribbling the space.