Haiti: History Embedded in Amber

Collaborating with students, Duval-Carrie visualizes Haiti

Click above image for an article about the project from the Duke Chronicle, or click here for PDF.

Global Caraïbes
Focus sur la création contemporaine caribéenne
du 12 juin au 17 octobre 2010

Qu’est-ce qu’être caribéen aujourd’hui ?
Cette question complexe est abordée par l’exposition « Global Caraïbes » qui livre à travers les oeuvres de vingt-trois artistes issus de 11 pays du bassin caribéen, des réponses très personnelles à cette interrogation.
«Global Caraïbes» prolonge l’exploration des territoires artistiques et singuliers engagée par le Musée International des Arts Modestes.
A cette occasion, le MIAM dédie un espace à Edouard Duval-Carrié, artiste, collectionneur et commissaire de l’exposition. En écho à «Global Caraïbes», des oeuvres de deux artistes caribéens, Kcho, cubain et Hervé Télémaque, d’origine haïtienne vivant en France seront exposées, ainsi qu’une projection de photographies de peintures de rue, prises à Port-au Prince (Haïti), rassemblées dans le projet de livre du photographe anglais Pablo Butcher.

Exposition co-produite par Culturesfrance

This was my first day of actual “baseling,” as people often say, and did this Basel begin with a bang! It was a bang that ricocheted from Miami to Haiti and all through the Caribbean, then across the Atlantic riven by the blood, sweat, and tears of the Middle Passage, and then to Africa and back to Miami.

I’m talking about my visit to the must-see exhibit “Global Caribbean II: Caribbean Trilogy, Focus on the Greater Antilles” at the Little Haiti Cultural Center. There are absolutely riveting, knock-your-socks off artworks on view by Edouard Duval Carrie, Jose Bedia, and Jose Garcia-Cordero. The best of these can make your heart weep.

I’m also talking about a spectacular performance of excerpts from a new contemporary opera, “Makandal,” produced by Harlem Stage of New York City. (www.HarlemStage.org) As Harlem Stage executive director Patricia Cruz explained before the performance I saw this morning at 11 am, what we saw was about a half-hour “collage” woven from the mighty collusion of visual arts, dance, music, and song. To some extent it was inspired by the continually astonishing art by Duval Carrie, who for years has given the rich visual art history of Haiti a special voice in contemporary art.

This collage of an opera-in-progress wove together the story of Makandal, an 18th Century Haitian revolutionary who led a failed slave revolt, with the story of 21st Century illegal immigrants from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic embarking on a perilous boat trip to Puerto Rico to find a better life, to find the the right to live freely and with dignity.

(Click link above for full article…)

<Via: ArtCentric by Elisa Turner>

St Augustine Haiti Seminar 2006

Dates: Tuesday 15 May to Thursday 17 May 2007

The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool announces a three-day seminar on Haitian art, film, and literature. This seminar, to be held at U.W.I. St Augustine, will build on, develop, and diversify the work of the 2004 Haitian bicentenary conference. The seminar will give particular emphasis to contemporary Haitian art, film, and literature, and other aspects of Haitian culture that were not fully discussed in 2004. The following topics give an indication of the range of material to be addressed: Haitian history in contemporary visual arts and film; the Haitian revolution in travel writing; history and politics in literature produced post-2000 (and especially in the period from 2003 to the present: Madison Smartt Bell, Jean Metellus, Fignolé, Sauray, Trouillot, Lahens etc.). Speakers will consist of a mix of scholars, artists, writers, and filmmakers.

Opening with some reflections on the scholarly work that has appeared in the wake of 2004 (e.g. the special issues of Yale French Studies, Small Axe, and Research in African Literatures), the first day of the seminar will feature presentations and discussions from both critics and authors on contemporary Haitian literature. The afternoon session will be devoted to Haitian film, and will include contributions from scholars and filmmakers.

The second day will focus largely on contemporary Haitian literature, with two morning sessions again bringing together leading scholars and authors. The afternoon session will discuss literary representations of the Haitian Revolution, and in particular the American author Madison Smartt Bell’s epic trilogy, All Souls’ Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone That the Builder Refused. On the evening of the second day there will be an open-air video/music performance by Haitian artist Maksaens Denis.

The final day’s morning sessions will feature presentations on Haitian art by both scholars and contemporary Haitian artists. The artists will present their work, and discussions will focus on themes such as exile, history, and the role of popular culture. The closing session will be a roundtable discussion, which will include all of the artists, authors, and filmmakers. The aim of this session, and of the seminar as a whole, will be to identify and discuss common interests and points of divergence across the spectrum of contemporary Haitian culture. How is Haitian culture renewing itself and adapting to the realities of the twenty first century? How are the longstanding contrasts between exiled artists and those who have remained in Haiti being refigured in the new century? How are questions of gender, history, memory, and popular culture being reconsidered?

(included in publication)

by Lilia Fontana

Edouard Duval Carrie was born in Haiti in 1954 and was educated at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris, McGill University, the University of Montreal, Quebec, and holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Loyola in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is currently a resident of Miami Beach, Florida. He has had numerous exhibitions in various venues throughout the Americas as well as Europe, and his works are in collections, among them, the Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa, Miami Art Museum, Florida, Musee des Arts Africains et Oceaniens, Paris, Musee du Pantheon National Haitien, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico, and The Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan. Arts International awarded him a residency for the Foundation Claude Monet, Giverny, France in 1988 and in 2000 he was awarded a residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris by the Maine de Paris.

He has been the recipient of the Southern Arts Federation Visual Art Fellowship and the South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual Art Fellowship. In 1996, he fulfilled an Art in Public Places commission for the Jefferson Reaves Rehabilitative and Health Center in Miami. He is currently working with six students apprentices to create a landmark public sculpture at an economically marginal community in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“Endless Passage” is the title of the exhibition of Edouard Duval Carrie at The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami. The exhibit has been organized by the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona and will run in Miami through September 7, 2003. It is an interesting compilation of this artist’s work from the last decade. Though short of a retrospective, the exhibit does provide a glance at the evolution of this multi-faceted artist through sculptures, paintings, and installations.

Duval Carrie’s iconography is best understood through the multi-leveled phenomena of all emigres in a new land. He combines the cultural, religious, and social matrix of the Haitian experience, creating a hybrid vocabulary rich in Haitian “Nafve” traditions. He mixes the storytelling folklore from the African Diaspora and juxtaposes it within Post Modern terms. His work is a potent cultural instrument recording rituals, protocols, and myths. Duval Carrie gives birth to a unified human experience with a new consciousness. Early Duval Carrie’s are tongue-in-cheek works with socio-political commentaries. They created his forum to judge and criticize the Duvalier father and son sanguinary regimes. It is seem in the piece “Mardi Gras au Fort Dimanche.” The artist places “Baby Doc” Duvalier in the center of the canvas dressed in a wedding gown and holding a gun, surrounded by an array of characters from Haitian society. The ladies are adorned with gold, red lips, fancy clothes and pumps. The entourage also includes a Cardinal, a skeleton in a fancy suit, a cross-dresser carrying a basket with a hand coming out, and a military man; all, except Baby Doc, are wearing sunglasses. The skeleton has his hand around the dictator’s neck. They are placed within a room outside a notorious prison where the Duvaliers tortured and killed their opponents. Hands dripping blood are nailed all over the wall. Above them is a small barred window in the center of the wall that depicts the lush tropical landscape of Haiti. Rich in symbolism, the artist plays with the somber tones of the group and juxtaposes them against the bright greens and blue skies seen through the window, as if saying Haiti will prevail no matter what.

Duval Carrie’s work could not be completed without the ingredients of the island’s Voodoo religion: practiced primarily by peasants, but influencing every fiber of Haitian society. Voodoo has established in his work a pictorial vocabulary with an abundance of iconographic symbols. It is seen in works like “Dantor,” a lit plastic giant sculpted head approximately 90 by 48 by 48 inches that greets the spectator at the entrance of the exhibition. It is a simulacrum of a “Voodoo goddess in a large headdress with babies protruding from the head and eyes, suggesting a fertility goddess. Along with this piece is one titled “River Snakes and Other Gods.” It is a large “T”-shaped structure made up of illuminated boxes upon which colored plastic snakes appear to be slithering towards the Dantor head. Along its sides are six smaller versions of spirits heads, all depicting a Voodoo god or goddess. It is an impressive piece, juxtaposing light, shapes and size to create the illusion of a postmodern Voodoo ceremony.

One of the most provocative series is that of the polyptych “Milocan ou La Migration des Esprits”. It is a visual narrative of Haitian history as seen through the eyes of this artist depicting Colonial times to the present. The first image is titled “Le Depart,” where an array of colorful figures shackled together walk through a dense African forest. The variety of figures are representative of the many African tribes enslaved in Haiti. The depiction of the characters is as varied as the tribes. The figures are also simulacrums of the gods and goddess within the Voodoo religion. A few of the figures are nude, painted only in solid colors; some with plumage on their heads and body; other are dressed in various costumes; tagging along in the back is a shackled personified tree. The imagery is erotic, even decadent, as the wise and powerful melange of religious icons are uprooted from their native lands en route to their next destination.

In the next part of the story, Duval Carrie offers the viewer “La Traversee.” The African characters are now placed in a cramped boat crossing the Atlantic, reminiscent of the exodus taken by many Haitians refugees. The boat is full of omnipotent characters who have brought on board the animated tree standing tall in the back of the vessel and spreading its limbs throughout the background of the painting. The tree is the symbol of life and their ancestral Africa, and it is now pointing the way to their future homeland.

The following painting is titled “L’Emprise du Funeste Baron.” It is the funereal Baron spirit dancing through the overgrown foliage of a depopulated Haiti. He leaves on the soil the markings of his whirls and spins. The last painting in the series is “Le Monde Actuel ou Erzulie Interceptee.” It is a habitual occurrence for Haitian migrants in their quest for a better life to be repatriated by the United States Coast Guard. In Duval Carrie’s painting, it is no different for the Voodoo goddess Erzulie. Flanked by an officer on each side, the beautiful exotic brown-skin spirit coquettishly fixes her long curls. Adorned with rings, headdress, and various heart shapes, she dreamingly walks barefoot down the steps of the Coast Guard vessel. Strapped to her waist she has a baby representing the next generation of the diaspora.

Duval Came frames his oils on canvas with elaborate structures. In the Milacan series, the artist has used a blue-green tone and embellished the area with ceremonial markings and collaged objects. Like the paintings, the frames are rich in symbolism. In his most recent works, Duval Carrie seems to have abandoned the overt political satire as well as the painterly surface. Plastic, resin, real and fake plant life, and sublime subject matter appear to be the predilection. The work is a reappropriation of the style of tables found in tropical restaurants, where shells, sands, and other underwater objects are frozen in time by the resin process. In “L’Abre Deracine (The Uprooted Tree),” the work is an encased painting of a tree with collaged birds, leaves, and heart-shaped fruit. The frame is labored over as much as the painting, and it is all covered with a thick layer of dried resin. Another work along the same line is the installation piece titled “La Vraie Histoire Amblagos,” depicting the story of the Voodoo waters spirits. It is a series of rectangular panels placed one beside the other. The panels are made up of layers. He first paints the elusive and ephemeral creatures looking up with imaginary underwater plants and flowers. They are then encased with resin. After the resin dries, the artist reintroduces the paint and collaged objects to mimic the plant life. The installation is transformed into a large, luminously translucent pond petrifying the artist’s phantasmal spiritual world.

Duval Carrie has taken his place with the new generation of Haitian artists who have been in the universities of Europe, Canada, and the United States. The level of sophistication in the execution of the subject matter and highly accomplished manner of handling the material is a proof of the training this artist has received. His chosen genre is poised between today’s multitude of artistic isms and the Haitian vernacular. He has embraced the two worlds, the European and the Creole.

- Artealdia International -

Artist Interview – Edouard Duval Carrié
by LatinArt. com

LatinArt: How did you first become interested in incorporating popular/folk elements into your work?

Duval Carrié: I personally believe that most artists are in one way or another reflections of their immediate surroundings. What they are confronted with on a daily routine is bound to affect and influence their personal visions of the world. This general tendency would simplify my answers to inquiries on the relative importance of popular culture in the context of the contemporary art world. But with the advent of a rapid globalization and the proliferation of information at all levels, this permits everyone, and particularly artists, to take their ideas from a global well.

This phenomenon is particularly well exemplified in the music world, where artists in the medium find it quite exhilarating to plunder the millennia of musical data from the global village and rehash it into quite surprising “new” creations. The same applies to the visual art world that is seeing, and justly so, its preconceived barriers and standards tumbling one after another. Regionalism, concepts of center vs. periphery, high and low art, are all ideas that are being reassessed due to the pressure exerted by a constant input of visual reference to larger and larger numbers of individuals that in turn reappraise these references in ways not initially intended.

Of concern to me was my proximity to a culture that was relatively inaccessible even to me, who am from the region. I’m talking about the popular expressions of Haíti, which though quite complex, are summed up in the mystifying word of Voodoo. Though the cultural pattern is quite similar to many Latin American societies, Haíti has been singled out as an oddity. And an oddity it might be, because its early history and subsequent isolation created patterns that are deeply rooted in old African concepts and world-views. Those are part of what I’ve been looking at in my work and hopefully render less cryptic. My position as an artist has permitted me to look both from within and without a situation that to most seems fraught with ambiguity and negativity, to say the least. But it is part of the global picture, and to remind others of its existence, if only in art, serves to accentuate the pressures that only visual experiences can offer. I’m only partaking in a tendency that seems to be global in intent, for this pattern is seen not only in Latin America but also in Africa and certainly in Asia. Cynics have attributed this solely to an economic agenda, but looking at the phenomenon closely puts in evidence a genuine attempt to reach a certain consensus in plurality; at least a certain coexistence.

LatinArt: What is your opinion about how our notion of what is “high” and “low” art has now become more ambiguous and increasingly interchangeable than in the past?

Duval Carrié: The notions of north and south, far and near, high and low, in and out are constantly being reevaluated, for such notions do painfully exist. It is undeniable that pervasive concepts such as the one of “high” culture are being questioned if not reassessed as convenient marketing ploys. In today’s short attention span world, refinements of the effort seem to be superfluous if not totally out of sync. Artists find themselves with freedoms they never thought possible, but in the end they are left much to their own device to interpret their worlds. Traditions and folk-ways seem to come in handy at such times, and we find many artists appropriating the language of popular culture in order to elaborate their creative construct.

In doing so, mechanisms that are used in the elaboration of what is considered as popular culture find their way into art forms that sometimes can only be read because they contain these elements, making those art forms more accessible if only to the ones familiar with those cultures. Ultimately, folk-ways and popular imagery have this resilient quality that makes them enduring facets of any given culture.

LatinArt: How will these changes continue to affect the future of contemporary art in Latin America, a region with a long tradition (both past and present) of popular/folk art?

Duval Carrié: Many scholars claim that with the advent of globalization, artists (whether they are from the suburbs of Lagos, Kuala Lumpur or Lima) have enough information at their disposal that enables them to create within what is defined as a “contemporary” format. To me, this seems a just conclusion, but somewhat amiss of reality – yes, artists having access to this global net can partake in a creative process governed by such rules, but the global configuration is far from being an all-inclusive one. The sad truth is that a much larger portion of the globe’s population can be counted as “out,” and thus governed mainly by an amalgam of the culture that is based in folk ways and traditions, in turn producing or evolving into popular cultures that in turn influence us artists. To me, this situation is a more just assessment of reality today, though reflective of serious inequalities and injustices, and ultimately, a more salutary situation then the one envisaged in the bland utopia of the global village.

By Judy Cantor

published: July 20, 1994

A group of bare-chested green men with African features and leaves for hair are gathered together in a large, unfinished island landscape propped against the wall in the back room of Edouard Duval-Carrie’s Miami Beach house. Palm trees line the lush, painted shoreline, their slim trunks positioned in a row tight as the bars of a jail cell. In the distance, a ship with a red cross on its hull bobs in the water. The figures, personifying loas, or Congo spirits, are zombies with dark vacant slashes for eyes. Their searching expressions recall fuzzy newsprint faces of anonymous black Haitians seen in recent front-page photographs of anchored boats bound for nowhere. The painting is part of “The Savage Garden,” an installation that Duval-Carrie is preparing for an upcoming gallery exhibition in Colombia. There are more works in progress in the studio he recently rented in the South Florida Art Center on Lincoln Road. One of these, inspired by the mapou tree, legendary home of vodou spirits, depicts a deeply rooted Tree of Life. Decapitated indigo heads hang from its branches, a ghostly crop of strange fruit.

Dressed in khaki shorts and a T-shirt, Duval-Carrie sits on a paint-stained chair in his studio, a diminishing pack of Marlboro Lights close at hand. He had visited Haiti two weeks earlier, before the embargo that banned commercial flights and significant financial transactions between Haiti and the United States was imposed. Since then, as a result of the dire economic situation, production at his father’s construction materials factories in Port-au-Prince has slowed almost to a stop. At the same time, the U.S. has begun amassing Marines on assault ships off the coast of Haiti.

“At this point I’m very worried for my family’s safety,” confesses Duval-Carrie, whose frequent calls to the island are now threatened by the deteriorating Haitian telephone service. “It’s really getting tragic — I’m getting sick.”

He shakes his head, inhales some smoke, then enthusiastically begins to describe his idea for a painting called Fountain of Violence. In it, a fountain will spew a selection of unsavory characters, some of the “Mafiosos and killers who’ve been running Haiti for the past 50 years.” This piece is to be part of a triptych that also will include Fountain of Verbs, inspired by the island’s widespread illiteracy and the ruling military regime’s convoluted propaganda, as well as the utopian Fountain of Light.

“It’s called ‘The Savage Garden,’ but it’s going to be a very formal garden full of all sorts of illusions, and where all sorts of events take place, where the mythical world meets reality,” offers the artist, speaking English with a light French accent. “It will be an exact metaphor for Haiti.”

The escalating Haitian crisis makes the installation’s themes topical, but in Duval-Carrie’s work they are a constant concern. His paintings depict a carnavalesque tragicomedy of Haitian experience, with a cast that includes military dictators, African slaves, popular heroes, revolutionary soldiers, and vodou spirits.

Light-skinned, with translucent blue-green eyes, a North American education, and the lusty, ready laugh of a career diplomat, Duval-Carrie’s articulate presence negates the ready stereotype of the naive illiterate often applied to Haitian artists. His work, while retaining elements of typical Caribbean styles, depicts island culture that challenges the images of industrious villages and quaint countrysides that hang in commercial Haitian art galleries, establishments Duval-Carrie pointedly avoids. With a wicked sense of humor and a popular conscience, he continues a lesser-known artistic tradition of social criticism.

“I am a chronicler of my times,” the artist asserts. “It’s imperative that someone should do it, at least that way there will be some images of what happened during this experience. Right now, you have to be concerned. My whole family is in Haiti, and the situation gets more dramatic every day. The United States, the major power on this planet, is ready to invade this tiny country, and of course I know they’re going to make us pay for it down to the last bullet…. It’s simple, you cannot be sending thousands of people a week to your neighbors. And these people aren’t going next door to Santo Domingo or to Caracas. They’re coming right here to South Florida. The problems in Haiti are closer in Miami than anywhere else.”

Duval-Carrie, his British wife, Nina, and their sons, four-year-old Thaddeus and two-year-old Krystian, came to Miami last year from Paris, where the artist had lived for six years. The move here was intended as the first step toward a permanent return to Haiti, but that plan was interrupted when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced into exile.

“When Aristide came into power, I said, ‘This is the time for me to go back,’” he recalls. “I decided to first install the family here and go back and forth. Then the thing went haywire.”

The artist has, in fact, lived outside of Haiti for most of his 39 years. He spent part of his childhood in Puerto Rico, where his father took refuge from the oppressive regime of Franaois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in the Sixties. His parents, his brother Robert, a political activist, and another brother and sister who work in the family’s construction and automotive parts businesses have remained in Haiti since their return there in the early Seventies. Edouard stayed at home, a large house in Port-au-Prince, for a few more years, then struck out on his own, spending his last year of high school in New York City. He then went on to study at Loyola and McGill universities in Montreal.

Although Duval-Carrie had been interested in art since he was a child, as a college student he did not consider making it a career. “I could not with a straight face look at my parents and tell them I was going to study art,” he explains. “I had to do something practical.” So he studied urban planning.

However, he did get a part-time job at a Montreal gallery that sold a multiethnic selection of sacred artifacts. The owner, George Butcher, a collector of the works of Swiss painter and graphic artist Paul Klee, also held an occasional small exhibition of modern art.

Influenced by the gallery’s stock, which reminded him of popular Haitian art, Duval-Carrie started painting in his spare time. In the late Seventies, he showed some of his works, which he now describes as “very Haitian” in style, at Butcher’s gallery.

“I’m a self-taught artist,” he stresses. “Just like everybody else in Haiti. It was Haitian art that pushed me to paint in the first place, and I was interested in continuing that form and identifying with it. There are some wonderful things in Haitian art that are always lost in the mire of it all.

“I was also, I admit, looking for my roots. Just because I am outside I cannot just pretend that I am not a part of them or I’m not concerned, which is what a lot of people do. It’s very difficult to reconcile one’s artistic ambitions with a reality where you feel compelled to react.”

A full-length portrait of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who succeeded his father, “Papa Doc,” as Haiti’s president in the early Seventies, was among the works that Duval-Carrie had prepared for his first big show, held at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in 1980. Baby Doc is ridiculously posed wearing a frilly wedding dress and opera gloves, his nostrils flared, eyes rolling, and holding a pistol a few inches from his left temple. The work was excluded from the exhibition after an apprehensive gallery director convinced the artist, then an idealistic 25-year-old, that hanging it on the wall would not be wise.

“I just said, ‘Come on, why not?,’” he remembers. “And she said, ‘You put that up and we’re all going to prison.’”

There is another painting from the same period, titled Surprise partie chez les militaires (Surprise Party at the Soldiers’ House), in which a group of decorated men in uniform are gathered at what appears to be military headquarters. The smallest member of the squad holds a cake in the shape of Haiti, while another stands poised with a white plastic card, granting himself carte blanche to divide and distribute the treat among the generals.

That work was exhibited at the Centre d’Art show, although Duval-Carrie, at the urging of the gallery director, took the precaution of painting a cellophane wrapping over the cake to obscure the obvious political significance. It nonetheless caught the attention of a government representative who attended the show’s opening, and then proceeded to interrogate the artist about its meaning.

“I told him, ‘You know, they’re just having a party,’” he recalls, laughing. “They really did not like what I was doing. It was like looking at yourself in a mirror.”

Duval-Carrie has continued to show his work in Haiti, most recently in 1991, when Aristide was still in office. Since then, he has exhibited in museums and galleries in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the United States. Last April, he had a one-man show at Gutierrez Fine Arts in Miami Beach. His large paintings currently sell for $15,000 apiece, and he has been living off his work for several years. Although he has some faithful buyers — one owns 35 Duval-Carrie paintings — few are Haitian collectors.

“In Haiti, I’m the only one who’s taken the whole baggage of popular art and worked that into a contemporary language. I’m the outcast in this whole thing,” he says with a shrug. “You cannot claim that I am a primitive person. People in Haiti looked at my work and said, ‘Who is this and why is he doing that?’ It’s like I’m a traitor to the cause. Which cause it was, I never quite understood.”

On the other hand, some international art dealers have dismissed Duval-Carrie’s work because of its concern with Haitian subject matter and its illustrative style, lumping it together with that of other artists under the label “Haitian art,” a historically indiscriminate category.

“People say that my language is too regional, but what am I supposed to do, just discard Haiti totally?” Duval-Carrie asks, gesturing toward the paintings in his studio. “I feel just like other Haitians: excluded. I’m just trying to say something about myself and others. These are people with their own belief systems and their own ways. One day they will get it together and do something great.”

Then he clamps down hard on his cigarette and explains why he took such an interest in exposing the absurd side of Haitian politics in the first place.

“I got involved in all that because my brother spent almost two years in prison,” he relates. Robert, who is one year older than Edouard, was arrested when he was a university student in the late Seventies. After his release, he founded an association of former political prisoners, and currently co-edits a newsletter monitoring human-rights abuses in Haiti. No concrete charges ever were made against Robert. Like the rest of the Duval family, he had friends associated with a group of intellectuals who were members of the opposition to the Duvalier regime.

“The reason [for arresting him] was completely arbitrary,” Edouard explains. “They just came to my father’s plant where he worked and dragged him away. When they released him, he was in such a bad state they had to wait another six months before they could let him go. He was covered with pustules, and he had not eaten for so long. My mother had to send him food. It was pretty tragic. I came back from university right after he got out. I decided then that I could not just sit down and paint pretty pictures.”

n 1993 Duval-Carrie participated in the first Vodou Cultures Festival, held in the West African Republic of Benin. He created an installation on the beach using 23 small sculptures of Congo spirits popular in Haiti. The statues of Oggun (god of iron), Papa Loko (the wild spirit), and other gods were meant to act as beacons that would guide the spirits of dead Haitians back to their African homeland. The artist also hung three murals in the temple of Dagbo Hou Non, and subsequently was asked to paint the vodou holy man’s portrait.

“There’s this belief,” he remarks, while sopping up the sauce on a plate of conch stew with a thumb-thick slice of fried plantain, “that the spirits of the parting dead go back to Africa. Every ten years they ship them off in a boat.” It’s a busy weekday lunch hour at Chez Moy International Restaurant in Little Haiti. Diners at large tables talk softly in Creole over a radio playing Cuban boleros. “Whaaat?” he exclaims loudly, chuckling and shaking his head with an expression of exaggerated disbelief. “You have to say, ‘OK, these people are in another frame of mind.’”

Duval-Carrie revels in the irrationality of it all. During trips to Haiti he has been delighted to discover posters of his work in vodou temples. Although he is not is not a practitioner — the rituals involved are too time-consuming, he says — he is fascinated with vodou as a syncretic element of Haiti’s culture of conquest.

“The fantastic dimension in my painting is the fruit of observing everyday life in Haiti,” he explains. “The conditions there are so tragic that they have to be balanced with the supernatural.”

Duval-Carrie has been influenced by the images in drawings by vodou priests, and by popular fetishes. He makes exceptional artisanal wood frames for his paintings, decorating them with small plastic animals, masks, hands, tin cutouts, and glitter. The frames resemble altar pieces, and the artist recently discovered that similar adornments are placed around doors of African temples.

Vodou spirits are common protagonists in Duval-Carrie’s paintings. They take a variety of forms, from the glowing green specters seen in the works that make up “The Savage Garden,” to bright-colored, streetwise types Alike a portrait of Loko sporting dark shades — that have the combined contemporary swing and preindustrial edge of shop signs in Little Haiti.

“The spirits are the true representation of the people, and for me they are the soul of Haiti. The whole pantheon of gods is created in the image of man,” the artist enthuses, sipping sweet Haitian soda. “First of all they are there to provide for the people and to help the people and be part of them. They look like them, too. Of course, I put my imagination into it because there is a lot of fantastic activity. But basically I’m talking about the Haitian people when I paint spirits, and their capacity for being more than they really are.

“Most people in Haiti live very close to this imagery because there’s a lot of freedom in it,” he continues. “Art has always been a spiritual expression in Haiti, and to me that’s the great thing about it. What interests me is that first of all vodou is an expression of the people who try to remain true to themselves. And second of all it’s the political aspect. For me, it is foremost a religion of oppressed people. This is a people who have been fighting about everything. They were brought up as slaves, they conquered a little bit, and were put back into slavery. What happens is that the world cannot accept this any more. The fact that you have a population of 70 million individuals of which 80 percent are more destitute than they were two centuries ago… This is insufferable, do you understand?”

Duval-Carrie was one of three artists asked to create work for an exhibition dealing with the theme of the French Revolution’s influence on the tropics. It was held in 1989, the bicentennial of the revolution, at the Musee National des Artes Africains et Oceaniens, in Paris. Eventually, the show traveled to museums in a number of other countries, including Haiti, Senegal, and the U.S., where it was shown at the Davenport Art Museum, in Iowa, which has an important collection of Haitian art. Artists from France and Senegal also participated.

“I was the most figurative of the artists so I thought I should go into it with a lot of research,” the Haitian painter recalls. “You read the chronicle of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries in Haiti, and it’s as if you were reading about it today. It’s a country that’s split. You have the people of Haiti, of which the majority is black. You have an upper class which is all colors of the rainbow, but they have an attitude which is bringing out the problems you have now. You have a postcolonial society, and what was there in colonial times is what is there today. Nothing has changed.”

In works that are like surrealist political cartoons, Duval-Carrie pays “homage” to the revolution with a series of historical scenes painted in primary colors. A row of members of the Army of the Republic of Saint Domingue (Haiti’s former name) are posed on round pedestals like toy soldiers. Several other paintings feature a group of nine slaves: in one, the proud-postured Africans contentedly spearfish from a wooden boat; in another, they are shackled together as they shuffle dismally through a jungle. Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who wrote Haiti’s first constitution and died in a French prison after the uprising he led against France’s attempt to reestablish slavery was quelled by Napoleon’s army, is shown stepping on a snake as he grasps his decree. In another painting, he stands in a boat surrounded by crocodiles.

Brightly colored oil barrels are piled up in a far corner of the Little River Service Center in Little Haiti. Painted with idyllic tropical scenes by local Haitian artists, they’re meant to function as garbage cans in a litter campaign proposed by the center’s administrator, Fedy Vieux-Brierre. The barrels, which look too lightweight to withstand hurricane season, have not been approved for use by the city. So for now they’re being used to liven up the office.

Duval-Carrie did not want to paint a garbage can. He is, however, involved in another project with Vieux-Brierre, serving as vice-president of the recently formed Haitian American Artists Association. This will lead, Duval-Carrie hopes, to the founding of a Haitian Arts Center, which the artist envisions as a place that could offer residencies to both exile artists and those who still live on the island. Additionally, the center could host serious exhibitions of Haitian art that later could travel to Haiti when the situation there stabilizes.

Vieux-Brierre seems to have a more touristic function in mind for the arts center, establishing a place that would display handicrafts as well as art. (The art-center proposal is moot for the moment anyway. Little Haiti, whose businessmen rely on trade with Haiti, is suffering as a result of the current embargo. Artistic projects there are not a current priority.)

Similarly, Duval-Carrie has had to put his plans for returning to Haiti on hold. So he’s settling into Miami, and waxes enthusiastic about the city’s possibilities as an outpost for Haitian culture.

“I feel that this is an extension of Haiti. For the first time in Haitian history the Haitians have an enclave outside of Haiti. Even in New York that does not exist. I think that decisions will be made here,” he says optimistically, while acknowledging that building a strong Haitian community will take time. “What happens in Haiti happens again here. You have the Haitian intelligentsia, the upper middle classes, who are moving to places like Kendall, and you have the Haitian people here in Little Haiti.” Duval-Carrie says he looked for a house in Little Haiti, but opted for Miami Beach instead because the school system there has a better reputation.

Last spring the Aristide government-in-exile invited the ousted president’s supporters to celebrate the second anniversary of the new Haitian constitution at a reception at the headquarters of the Organization of American States, in Washington, D.C. Duval-Carrie created a site-specific installation for the occasion at the hosts’ behest.

Although the Duval family in Haiti has supported Aristide, the artist says he is not interested in party politics A or in political statements, for that matter. His name is absent from a petition signed earlier this month by 22 Haitian musicians and visual artists protesting U.S. intervention in Haiti. Duval-Carrie’s view of the situation is a little more complex.

“It’s not that I want the intervention. But something has to happen,” he stresses. “If the world community has decided to take on the cause, they have to do something about it.” In any case, he’s not very interested in signing petitions.

“I am not a politician,” Duval-Carrie cautions. “I am not a crusader, and I am not an activist. Activists have told me, ‘Edouard, your art speaks for itself.’