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Flavor magazine - Portfolio: Edouard Duval Carrié

by Paul Jerome

Haitian-born Miami artist Edouard Duval Carrié captures island superstitions and politics in poignantly irreverent art.

Heading east across N. Miami Av. away from the busy sidewalks of Little Haiti where loud speakers blare creole calypsos and vendors spill out into the street is the more sedate side of the Caribbean -flavored enclave.

You're a few blocks west of snaking Biscayne Blvd. which divides the fortunate and fortuneless in this near-downtown section of Miami, where eastward chi-chi high-rise condos hug the bay and the scarred old city to the west is the domain of mainly masses transplanted from across the sea.

At the fringe of Little Haiti that's closer to Biscayne, gentrification is slowly transforming the weary real estate into worthwhile investments as the bohemian set trickles away from the crowded South Beach barrier island for the city proper.

Edouard Duval Carrié is one of the early adopters to this nouveau plateau of Little Haiti. Duval Carrié probably has more reason than most other Miami artists to suckle the neighborhood. He's Haitian, a mulatto of privileged heritage who wants to be as close to home as possible, at least where his creative crib is concerned.

"This neighborhood is moving into a very interesting position," said Duval Carrié. "Miami Beach has become saturated and overly done and very expensive. Biscayne is becoming a new strip to go to."

He abandoned South Beach a few years back and last year he moved into a 5,000-sq-ft converted auto repair shop with lofty ceilings where he shares the space with another artist. He and his British-born wife and two young boys still live at the beach, but for all intents and purposes the Little Haiti studio is practically home for the 48-yr-old Haitian exile who came to Miami from France nine years ago.

He spends most of his waking hours here, he tells a visitor as he gives a tour of the sweeping studio space that leads through tall cathedral doors into his living room - a crowded mini-gallery populated with sculpture, collages, batik, paintings and a wild assortment of intriguing art on the walls, floor, and under a glass coffee table. A narrow flight of stairs leads to his loft office.

"I come here around 10 o'clock and I go have dinner with my family and I come back until midnight," he said. "And if I don't have anything to do with my family or other obligations, I even come here on Sunday."

Beginning in his teenage years, before the family fled the Papa Doc Duvalier regime for Puerto Rico, Duval Carrié became drawn to visually documenting island life and its superstitions. His oil on canvas and acrylic works mockingly depict post-colonial existence in the former French colony where most of the people are gripped in a full-nelson of stifling poverty and voodoo superstitions.

A good measure of the Haitian art purveyed today could be classified as self-taught primitive interpretation of idyllic country life or sweet scenes, boldly painted.

But Duval Carrié has never been part of that mold. He set out to give his paintings more meaning than just pigment prettily dabbled on canvas.

He is trying to convey messages about the sense of tragedy and turmoil that Haitians either endure or flee. His works demonstrate how he feels about Haiti and its relationship with the bigger world.

The visual storytelling pieces he paints are really several paintings within a painting, each telling in sometimes mystical fashion several stories that he thinks are interconnected.

A recurring theme is the escape of Haitians to the continental United States, so images of migration are part of the scene in a fair portion of his work.

Many of his paintings have a decorative feel with elaborately enhanced frames that are colorfully sprinkled with collage-type elements, such as small plastic figures and toys.

In the past 15 years, Duval Carrié has incorporated sculpture - bronze and plastic - to his paintings in creating colorful and elaborate installation, as he calls them.

"Erzulie's Boat"

From a late summer 2002 interview that traversed a plethora of topics relating to art and life, Duval Carrie shares his unbridled viewpoints.

Q. At what point did it crystallize for you that you were becoming an artist?
A. There is a very famous place in Haiti called the Center of Art, which was established in the '50s and that's where most of the school for what is called Haitian art evolved from. And since my early age I used to frequent it. I remember buying a little piece here and there as I grew up. And I got to the point where I could not afford anymore so I decided I better do it myself (laughing).

Q. You're probably more known these days for dramatic sculptures that have very African motifs and came out during the Olympics.
A. That was a very peculiar story. They invited me to participate in 1996 at the Olympics so I decided to bring the whole voodoo pantheon to Atlanta to meet their cousins. It was like an unprecedented chance to do so (laughs).

So what I did was take the format of those very prestigious and those very spectacular Roman bronzes and evolved from there. It was like a wall of sculptures and they were like on little pedestals. I did about 30 different ones in bronze. It's a noble material. I had never done it and I decided to just launch myself in making those deities.

Q. There's a mystical and spiritual quality to your work. Explain that?
A. They represent basic humanity. It's a projection into the universal, of human frailties, of human fears. It's like a synthesis of what we are all about. My characters are not like Christian gods, omnipotent and perfect. They are more like the Roman gods who had frailties and they love and hate and punish and get punished. I have put this whole cast of gods as boat people, living in Haiti or here in Miami trying to adapt, gods being common people.

Q. Where do you get your ideas?
A. Sometimes I have visions, but mainly it's like an elaboration of a theme. How am I going to discuss in a very visual poetic way very simple political or social problems and mask them so that only when people get into it do they get the whole story. I don't like propaganda; to me it's anathema. I try to do it in a more poetic way.

Q. You 're here almost every day?
A. Almost every day.

Q. Do you have to be here everyday?
A. I don't have to be anywhere. (Laughs.)

Q. So it's a passion.
A. Absolutely. It's a passion. It's like something driving me sometimes.

Q. Where are you gravitating to these days? More sculpture or painting?
A. My work is not an easy task. I have to live off of it. So I have to be satisfying people here, people there. Sometimes I block people out and say I will do something that I am really interested in working on, which is what I have just done. I just finished a big installation for a show in Phoenix and I did huge pieces for them. But people have been bothering me with assignments and commissions.

Q. What percentage of your work is commission?
A. Oh, not very much. Maybe 25:75. I like to do my work and take chances. If people like it and buy it, wonderful. If not, I am stuck with it. (Laughs.) And it doesn't matter. To me it's the process that counts. It's not what happens to the piece. Sometimes, I discard them. I like to pursue my ideas and get it to the point where I want it. Once the painting is done, I am totally uninterested. I make sure that it is photographed and catalogued, but it is the process that drives me.

Q. And your production in a given year?
A. I create two to three bodies of work because I have at least one to three exhibits of caliber a year, possibly at a museum. And I like to create new work. I did a floor for a museum which was 30 by 40 feet and you could walk on it. It's a water scene. You can walk on it. It is made of wood and covered with a plastic resin. It was painted like a mosaic for a floor. It's like walking on water. The theme was the lore of underwater spirits. In the African culture every thing moves under water contrary to the Western culture in which (everything) goes in the cosmos. There are a lot of water spirits. In Haiti, for example, every five to 10 years they have these huge ceremonies to send the spirits back to Africa, they reunite the dead people and then they ship them underwater.

Q. Why is your work in such high demand?
A. Collectors come to it for the visual characteristic of the work. It's a magical thing that happens between whoever looks at the work. What they get out of it is a sociopolitical agenda which is of some worth. They feel this guy has an agenda and systematically he's exploring it. So the collectors respect that because there is a commitment to that. Consistently I come back to the core idea and it's always somewhere present in the work. At a critical level they respect that because there is a continuity and a seriousness and apart from the work whatever aesthetic value it has.

Q. What does your work cost?
A. From $2,000 to $25,000. I am still manageable. I am not one of those stars and I don't think I will ever be because my work is very specific and anchored. I am not treading on being a novelty or the latest thing in the avenue.

All I ask is for people to give me the means to continue. I don't want to become rich, I don't want to become famous, I don't care about all that. I want to make sure that I leave a body of work or constitute a body of work which will have a certain coherence to it and it will be my life story. I am very clear about that and very systematic about it.

Q. Why did you choose Miami?
A. I think Miami is a very particular place. It's a young city and it's going to be more and more confronted with its role as a lighthouse for the area. More and more the destinies of what's happening in the Caribbean, especially, are going to be decided here. Haiti's archaic culture for example meets the New World and it's very interesting for me to see what's happening on that level... how Haitians are adapting in the United States, what are they achieving or not achieving and what they are sending back. There is still a correlation, it's half an hour away by plane. There's Little Haiti. New York has about four times more Haitians than Miami, but here it means something.

Q. What kind of literature do you feel drawn to?
A. I like world novels. I love Latin American literature, some Caribbean (I don't think they are there yet). I love Arabic and Indian modern literature. I mean Salmon Rushdie, people like that. I identify with them. I can read their stories and I relish it because I learn a lot from their point of view, how they are reacting to this globalization which I am feeling.

I enjoy John Updike and all these modem writers. Yes, they write very well and I get the gist of the story, but they don't engage me or I don't get totally captivated like when I read Rushdie or Garcia Marquez.

Q. Any blindsiding moments that taught you a lesson?
A. Yes. It was when my brother went back to Haiti and got arrested and put in prison for a year and a half. I was in Canada at the university in my early 20s. I was barred from going to Haiti because my parents were scared that I would suffer the same fate. I realized that things are serious in this world and you don't fool around. It was a political thing. That really shocked me to the point that I realized that the world is not an easy place and one has to be very careful about what ones does, politically and socially and not be frivolous.*

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