| As a teenager in Haiti, Edouard
Duval-Carrié spent a lot of time hanging around artists. "I
was fascinated by what they were doing," Duval says now. "Things
have gone not very well since, but there was a period in Haiti when
art was quite glorious."
The lost promise that Duval hints at in conversation is palpable
in "Endless Passage," a survey of his work at the Phoenix Art
Museum. Duval works the lush Caribbean palette on a grand scale to
tell Haiti's wrenching history, and the results are both seductive
and instructive: See the decorative circles on those lovely yellow
and blue floor tiles, made especially for this show? Look closer,
and you'll see that each one contains a different historic image of
the slave trade. And what appears to be a series of red ovals in the
background of an elaborate canvas marked Sucre Noir, or
Black Sugar, turns out, up close, to be a pattern of blank,
almost skull-like faces. These rich paintings (along with two superb
small bronzes and a large glowing orange sculpture of a head) will
draw you in and then school you, hard.
Like Hector Hyppolite, the self-taught artist who influenced him,
Duval incorporates the island's voodoo liturgy in his work; unlike
Hyppolite, Duval comes from an educated background and studied art
at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. (Duval spent more time at the
Louvre than he did in school, where his figurative, almost baroque
style wasn't encouraged. But he did learn the casting methods with
which he makes his extraordinary frames.)
Voodoo -- like Haiti, like Duval's work itself -- is a
multicultural stew that defies simple explanation, and it's
precisely Duval's use of figures from the voodoo pantheon as
allegorical symbols in his work that makes it so resonant. "To me,"
Duval says, "voodoo is like the essence of the Haitian culture. But
it's been totally maligned over the years, not only abroad but
inside Haiti as well. That I was emulating it was not very much
liked at all, even by other artists." He laughs. "Now that I'm a
little bit more established, they're reconsidering."
Although Duval has exhibited in Latin America, Mexico and Europe,
the show at the Phoenix Art Museum is his first mid-career survey in
this country. Props go to curator Brady Roberts for putting the show
together and getting it on the road; before coming to Phoenix,
Roberts worked at the Davenport Museum in Iowa, which, improbable as
it may seem, houses the largest collection of Haitian art in the
country.
Duval, who has lived in Montreal as well as Paris, San Juan, and
Port-au-Prince, once hoped that the situation in Haiti would improve
enough that he could return. Now, at the age of 48, he calls Miami
home. "I'm an American citizen right now, but I'm always interested
in the other," he says. "It's very important that we do that here in
this country: look elsewhere."
| phoenixnewtimes.com
| originally published: January 2, 2003
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