Flesh and Sacrifice: Iba Ndiaye at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Between Latitude and Longitude reveals Iba Ndiaye (1928–2008) not only as a modern painter of immense power but as a profound philosopher of the flesh. Born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, and trained in both Dakar and Paris, Ndiaye moved between African and European worlds—between what might be called two ontologies of being. His art transforms that movement into a metaphysical inquiry: what is flesh, and what does it mean to exist within it? For Ndiaye, painting is not merely representation but revelation, a mode of thinking through pigment and matter. Across his career, he developed what can only be called a metaphysics of the flesh—an understanding of human existence as both carnal and transcendent, fragile yet enduring, torn between suffering and spiritual radiance.

Curated with great sensitivity, Between Latitude and Longitude traces this evolving vision from Ndiaye’s early encounters with European modernism to the mature works where he fuses African ritual, Islamic spirituality, and Western painterly traditions. His early works bear the unmistakable mark of Paris—Picasso’s abstraction, Léger’s structure, Soutine’s visceral texture—but Ndiaye’s later paintings transform these influences into a philosophy of embodiment that is uniquely his own.

In Ndiaye’s work, flesh is never mere matter. It is the site where being reveals itself, where life and death, history and spirit, converge. His paintings treat the body not as a subject among others, but as the very condition of thought—a medium through which the visible world becomes intelligible. The body, in his canvases, thinks; it meditates, bleeds, prays. This is what distinguishes Ndiaye from the European modernists who inspired him: for him, painting is not a study of form but an act of metaphysical reflection.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Ndiaye’s Tabaski III (1970), explicitly depicts the aftermath of ritual sacrifice. The ram’s body, twisted and half-abstracted, glistens in layers of crimson and ochre, its form dissolving into painterly matter. The flesh here is not symbolic—it is the subject, the drama, the philosophy. In the West African celebration of Tabaski (Eid al-Adha), sacrifice commemorates Abraham’s obedience to God. But in Ndiaye’s hands, the ritual becomes universal: a meditation on the cost of existence, the passage from life to meaning. The painting’s thick impasto is not technique but ontology—the medium itself becomes flesh. Paint behaves like blood; the canvas becomes both altar and wound. The metaphysics of sacrifice here is also the metaphysics of painting: to make visible is to tear the surface, to offer the material up to transcendence.

In this way, Tabaski III positions Ndiaye as a thinker in the tradition of Chaim Soutine, Francis Bacon, and Rembrandt—artists who saw the human body as the locus of metaphysical revelation. Like Soutine’s Still Life with Rayfish (ca. 1924), Ndiaye’s canvas makes the carcass tremble with life. Flesh, rendered in luminous decay, becomes the language through which the invisible is spoken. But Ndiaye goes beyond Soutine’s existential anguish: his ram, rooted in the ritual cosmology of West Africa and Islam, joins the divine and the human in a single act of becoming.

In Tabaski III, as in much of his later work, Ndiaye enacts the drama of a world divided and yet seeking reconciliation. Flesh becomes the bridge between matter and spirit, Africa and Europe, history and transcendence. The sacrificial body is not only the ram of Abraham’s story—it is also the body of Africa, carved open by colonialism, yet still radiant with creative power. In this sense, Ndiaye’s metaphysics of the flesh is inseparable from history: it is a thinking of being under conditions of fracture and survival.

This positions him in profound dialogue with Francis Bacon, whose Head I (1948) likewise exposes the human form to annihilation. Yet Bacon’s flayed heads cry out in metaphysical despair, while Ndiaye’s sacrificed bodies retain an austere dignity. The difference is one of faith: Bacon’s flesh reveals the absence of God; Ndiaye’s reveals the persistence of the sacred within the mortal. For Ndiaye, the divine is not elsewhere but immanent in the substance of life itself.

Ndiaye’s engagement with Rembrandt deepens this metaphysical dialogue. The exhibition’s inclusion of Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Isaac (1655) alongside Tabaski III allows the viewer to perceive how Ndiaye reinterprets the European canon through an African and postcolonial consciousness. In Rembrandt, the divine hand intervenes to stop Abraham’s knife—a moment of mercy suspended in chiaroscuro. In Ndiaye, that intervention never comes. The world after the sacrifice is a world without reprieve, where meaning must be made within suffering itself.

This difference is crucial: for Rembrandt, God remains external, interrupting violence from above; for Ndiaye, the divine resides within the very materiality of pain. His metaphysics of the flesh is a theology without transcendence—God found not beyond the wound but within it. Flesh, therefore, becomes not the obstacle to salvation but its vehicle.

Rembrandt and Ndiaye share a moral intensity. Both conceive painting as testimony, a visual philosophy that confronts the mysteries of obedience, guilt, and compassion. Yet Ndiaye extends Rembrandt’s ethics into history. His “Isaac” is not merely a son but a continent—Africa bound upon the altar of modernity, awaiting a redemption that never comes. Through his art, Ndiaye turns the sacrificial drama inward: the painter becomes both Abraham and Isaac, both executioner and offering.

To describe Ndiaye as a philosopher of flesh is to recognize that his painting constitutes an ontology—a vision of being in which life and matter, suffering and meaning, are inseparable. His canvases suggest that existence itself is sacrificial: to live is to give oneself up, to endure transformation. Paint, pigment, and flesh share the same destiny—to be shaped, torn, reconstituted.

This is why Ndiaye’s surfaces are so tactile. Each brushstroke affirms the body’s reality, its weight and warmth, even as it gestures toward spirit. His paint bleeds, congeals, and glows; it incarnates thought. In this sense, Ndiaye belongs to a lineage of thinkers who sought to reunite metaphysics and embodiment—from Rembrandt and Soutine to phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, for whom “flesh is not matter but the element of being.” Ndiaye’s art can be read as a visual phenomenology of flesh, translating Merleau-Ponty’s insight into color and form. The world, for Ndiaye, is not composed of things but of bodies—each one a node of sensation, consciousness, and memory.

The exhibition’s title—Between Latitude and Longitude—thus signifies more than geography. It names the condition of being incarnate, suspended between earth and spirit, history and eternity. Ndiaye’s entire oeuvre unfolds within this interval. His engagement with European modernism was not imitation but inversion: he transformed the European fascination with the body into an African metaphysics of incarnation. Where modernism often fragmented the body to express alienation, Ndiaye reassembled it to express reconciliation.

His metaphysics of the flesh resists both abstraction and ethnographic reduction. It insists that the human condition—of vulnerability, endurance, and grace—is universal yet always historically situated. His art does not escape the body; it redeems it. To paint, for Ndiaye, is to think through flesh, to discover in the wound a source of revelation.

The Metropolitan Museum’s Between Latitude and Longitude finally situates Iba Ndiaye where he belongs—not only within the story of African modernism, but within the global history of philosophical art. He is a thinker of incarnation, a painter who turned color and gesture into metaphysical meditation. Through the flesh, Ndiaye found the Absolute—not as transcendence beyond the world, but as immanence within it.

In Tabaski III, the sacrificial act becomes the emblem of being itself: the endless exchange between life and death, material and spirit, visibility and mystery. Flesh, for Ndiaye, is not corruption but creation—the place where the divine takes form. His art thus stands as a luminous response to modern alienation: a reminder that to be human is to be embodied, that thought begins in the body, and that painting, when it is most profound, is a philosophy written in flesh.