After having invented a new pictorial way of appearing the company, the French artist of Haitian origin had experienced the manufacture of sculptures and collages. He died on November 10 at the age of 85.
by Philippe Dagen
The French artist of Haitian origin Hervé Télémaque died at the age of 85, Thursday, November 10, in a hospital in the Paris region.
He was born in Port-au-Prince on November 5, 1937 in a bourgeois, French-speaking and scholarly environment: motherless mother of literature, uncle poet, aunt musician. In 1957, which was the year of the coming to power of François Duvalier (1907-1971), he left the island for New York and the Student’s League art courses. He discovers abstract expressionism still dominant, with a marked and remained constant predilection for the painter Arshile Gorky. But he also discovers that racism and segregation are no more absent from the world of art than from the rest of North American society and that, Métis, he is not welcome.
In the canvases of this New York period, abstract gestuality is increasingly thwarted by the presence of signs taken from advertising or on the city walls, pictograms and letters which seem to be thrown on the pictorial surface and half erased. In this, he is then, without his knowledge, the exact contemporary of Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, who emerge from the Empire of the Painting action. But they do not undergo like him the hostility which makes his canvas Toussaint Louverture in New York (1960) a self-portrait implied as much of a tribute to the liberator of Haiti.
a new way to represent contemporary society
Rather than continuing to undergo this situation, Télémaque left New York for Paris in 1961 and later remained there, living and working in Paris, then in Burgundy and finally, from 1981, in his house workshop Villejuif. Upon his arrival, he was in contact with the surreal group, without becoming a full member, nor ask for the anointing of André Breton. It is true that, more than at the dreaming characteristic of surrealism in his last period, his works refer to the present state of the world. In Portrait de Famille (1962-1963), The Ugly American (1962-1964) or My Darling Clementine (1963), he invented a new way of appearing contemporary society.
His painting is not literally descriptive like most works of pop art, which is then spreading, although the artist arrives to use a technique recently developed, the Episcope, to cite fragments of imaging, from the Senegalese Banania tirailleur to the advertisements of female underwear and comics. It is also not exclusively symbolic, although skulls or the sign of the dollar sometimes appear there. View of today, it appears as a form of encrypted, ruthless and mocking realism as it was itself.
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