Heike Dempster

With Imagined Landscapes, the Perez Art Museum Miami presents a body of new works by the Miami-based Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrie. The eleven paintings and two chandeliers, all from 2013, explore the Caribbean Diaspora in Miami as well as the city’s geographical and cultural significance in the region.

The works also create a dialogue between the historic and contemporary representation of the Caribbean and Florida. The dialogue extends to include the viewer as well as the individual paintings placed, as part of the exhibition, into a larger context.

The Caribbean influence on the cultural landscape of South Florida is undeniable, mainly due to a large Caribbean Diaspora population. People from the Caribbean have contributed greatly to the diversity of Miami as their history, customs and art have also become part of Miami’s cultural heritage. Geography has made Miami a Caribbean city by proxy.

Duval-Carrie’s work integrates his Haitian heritage through his innovative use of traditional iconography, albeit adapted into a new contemporary Diasporic language. The new series of paintings in the exhibit addresses, just as his overall oeuvre, social and political conditions pertaining to the region.

The Caribbean has historically been presented as a lush, tropical Eden-like land of fertility and possibilities, especially during the period of colonization. Duval-Carrie used 19th century paintings like View from fern-Tree Walk, Jamaica (1887) by Martin Johnson Heade and “El rio de luz” (1877) by Frederic Edwin Church as reference material for his new 2013 versions of those imagined landscapes depicting various places in the Caribbean and Florida.

As Duval-Carrie translates the landscapes into the 21st century via his own aesthetic language he presents a narrative of the region. He renders the landscapes in black, glittering silver and the turquoise of the Caribbean Sea, captured in all its glistening beauty but with a dark, captivating and alluring undertone.

In an artistically rewritten historical account and, simultaneously, commentary on contemporary opinion, Duval-Carrie invites the viewer into a dialogue about the realities of life in the Caribbean, still sold as a tropical paradise today. The violent histories of colonization and slavery as well as 21st century problems such as social inequality, economic hardship and political corruption inform the art.

Trough intensive research Duval-Carrie has produced a series of paintings juxtaposing absolute beauty and mesmerizing imagery with contemporary conceptualism and an in depth exploration of ugly and uncomfortable topics. Mirroring the two-sided reality of the Caribbean the artist creates a relevant dialogue.

The viewer cannot escape this dialogue as the paintings not just communicate with each other due to the curatorial vision of Tobias Ostrander but also because the viewer’s reflections in the resin-covered landscapes intentionally involves everyone who engages with the painting into the narrative. The paintings, illuminated by two of Duval-Carrie’s chandeliers are also in an open dialogue with the space within the museum, as the institution represents Miami’s place within the conversation.

“Edouard Duval-Carrie: Imagined Landscapes” is on view until Aug. 31, 2014 at the Perez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami, FL 33132