Blending with Motifs and Colors: Haitian History Interpreted by Édouard Duval Carrié

• Published in: Small axe : a journal of criticism Vol. 9; no. 2; pp. 109 - 123
• Main Author: Middelanis, Carl Hermann
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bloomington Duke University Press 01.09.2005; Duke University Press, NC & IL
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Art galleries & museums; Artists; Avant-garde; French language; Middle class; Mythology; Nation states; Painters; Violence; Haiti; Port Au Prince Haiti
• ISSN: 0799-0537; 1534-6714
• DOI: 10.1353/smx.2005.0023

To discover traces of historical painting in Haiti, you would have to visit either the Haitian Museum of National History or consult one of the few art historians who have attempted to maintain and meticulously secure information about the nineteenth-century works destroyed by revolutions and natural disasters.1 Another option would be to go to one of the numerous art galleries where hundreds of paintings celebrating national history may be found. Parisian critics, probably long since tired of the countless historical images that went along with the bicentenary, celebrated the large-scale paintings, which were multicolor reminders that people of color had had to take charge themselves to put revolutionary ideas into practice. Since those days, Duval Carrie has set up his installations in varying contexts and has continued to create confrontations. Because Duval Carrie settled in Miami, he has often stylized the politically and economically motivated migration between Haiti and the United States as he did in this painting. The latter continues to exist only in the intact world of national mythology, which the "pearl of the Antilles" represented to French colonials, or in the mythic Africa, home to returning souls. [...]the lettering refers to the absent poor, the real victims of violence, which once again undermines the illusion created by the prosperous building and the abundant nature.