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Haiti's artistic triumph: Edouard Duval-Carrie shows his people's plight -- but also their victories.

Philip E. Bishop

Special to the Sentinel

September 11, 2006

Born from the suffering and triumph of the Haitian people, the island's vodou gods are on the move. Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrie, a longtime expatriate, plots their migration in art of great spiritual and political implication.

In "Divine Revolution: The Art of Edouard Duval-Carrie," on view at the Orlando Museum of Art, we find works of two distinct intentions. One is to speak truth about Haiti's complex political and social history, a truth perhaps best spoken by an interested and sympathetic outsider.

The other is to speak for the Iwa, the vodou deities that were born of Haitians' diverse African tradition but are now threatened by the people's desperate migration to the mainland.

Duval-Carrie left Haiti as a child, was educated in Montreal and Paris, and now has a studio in Miami's "Little Haiti." Schooled in contemporary art's ironic perspective and dexterous methods, Duval-Carrie is a perfect postmodern enthusiast for Haiti's checkered history and eclectic spiritual traditions.

His Orlando exhibition includes an installation first prepared for the Atlanta Olympics. Mimicking the ancient Romans' practice of traveling with busts of their classical gods, Duval-Carrie has filled a gallery with bronze busts of the vodou pantheon. The accompanying paintings recount a constant theme, the vodou gods in migration from Haiti to Miami. In "The World at Present," an indignant Erzulie, the vodou goddess of beauty, is held captive by the U.S. Coast Guard. In another scene, the gods crowd a rowboat and hold up a calabash that makes them invisible to a looming Coast Guard cutter.

Duval-Carrie's painting has a primitive or self-taught quality, marked by an exuberant sense of color. Works such as "The Migration of Beasts (Homage to Edward Hicks)" affect a visionary naivete, like illustrations for a gigantic children's book of vodou.

The frames and edges of these paintings reveal an artist of sophistication and savvy. Duval-Carrie's "Altar to Nine Slaves" is installed on a wall in sardonic imitation of a Catholic retablo altar. The nine slaves are presented like saints. Each carries an oar symbolic of his African heritage. Many of the picture frames have their own sculptural motif, containing carved or molded images in resin.

This technical ingenuity does not mask Duval-Carrie's forthright opinions about Haiti's troubled past and its uncertain future. His current exhibition includes fabric-based works prepared by Haitian workshops for the bicentennial of Haiti's anti-colonial revolution. The medium imitates the vodou "drapo," sequined flags used in religious rites, but the images -- based on an earlier series of paintings -- offer Duval-Carrie's candid commentary on Haitian history, which he calls "a tangle of exploitation and intrigue."

"The Black Novel of Saint-Domingue," for instance, analyzes colonial Haiti's complex racial castes that assigned status according to the lightness of one's skin. Another sequin work depicts Haitian revolutionary soldiers as pawns of their French masters, anticipating the Haitian military's "double history of liberation and oppression," as the artist's label explains.

The artist's insistent and impassioned voice is never quiet in this exhibition, whether speaking from wall labels or heard in the exhibition's companion iPod presentation. As the artist noted in an August museum lecture, Haiti was the first black republic. It is now the world's poorest nation. Having spent his life in exile, Duval-Carrie now seems determined to rescue its unique spiritual traditions from oblivion.

The vodou gods who are perpetually in transit in his paintings are a mildly comic and motley crowd. But they are also a telling metaphor, a mixture of the real and the mystical. Haiti was founded on the deadly forced migration of Africans to the Caribbean, memorialized in his powerful "The True History of the Underwater Spirits." The artist lives in Miami among Haitians today who are refugees from desperate poverty and relentless oppression.

In his magical images of the vodou gods in danger, Duval-Carrie is making an impassioned plea for a people in extremity. Save the gods, he seems to say, and we can save the people.

Philip E. Bishop is professor of humanities at Valencia Community College.