RENEWING WITH THE PAST.......


Caca Soleil , 1970
 I discovered Hervé Telemaque in New York some years ago when I had been there specifically for the Abstract Expressionism (particularly that of Aschile Gorky and Willem De Kooning). I was bowled over by De Kooning’s women so Telemaque took second place.
Telemaque is Haitian and was very mixed up about his identity. I would think that there had been a pervasive racism which intensified his sense of rootlessness. Much of his work is full of emotions in deleted signs, furious words and enigmatic pictograms. From the titles, we discover that there is a sexual anxiety. However, reading a title and then looking at the picture I found it quite difficult to associate the two.

Fonds, d'actualité N°, 2002

Toussaint, L'ouverture à New York, 1960

J'ai appris la nouvelle, 1960

Histoire sexuelle,1960

L'annonce faite à Marie, 1959

Autoportrait, 2002

Le moine comblé, 2014

La Séancière 1, 1996

Chauve-souris, 1994

Caraïbe 1, 1993

Etude pour fil, 1989

La Mère-patrie, 1981

Charrette à bras: le visible, 1979

Coupe n° 1, 1972
 A surealist period
Suite à Magritte, 1971

Suite à Magritte, 1971

Passage, 1960

La Gourmandise, 1974

Objets usuels, pour Vincent van Gogh?, 1970




Venus Hottentote n°2, 1962 and very like Bacon
La Femme adultère 1, 1995
Entre-jambes, 1994s

He came to Paris to live in 1961 with the baggage of some of the greatest American artists belonging to Abstract Expressionism movement . De Konning, Pollock, Rothko but soon he tired of this school and began once again to re-exlore a narrative approach to his work.

There was apparently a bad accident which damaged his spine and for quite some time, he needed to wear a corset. This comes through many of his paintings but once again, if you didn’t know the background, it would be difficult to understand the collages, sculptures, paintings represent what I suppose was the corset.










Many mediums were used, Collages (1974-1980) Assemblages (1979-1996) Charcoal drawings (1999-2002) and his most recent painting (2000-2015) when the subjects are mainly political.

For once the different periods did not influence me. Such a retrospective with over 50 paintings - well over - can been daunting. Many of his paintings I liked and many I didn’t. But it was the painting, not the period……





There was one painting which took me back many years to a film which probably marked me for a long time.........






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Michael Keane a dit…
Is it possible an artist needs to be emotionally disturbed before he/she can produce challenging art?
20/4/15 09:27
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