Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes is an exhibition project involving a series of new works generated over the past year by the Haitian-born, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié (b. 1954). Known for his innovative adaptions of traditional Haitian iconography, which he engages in order to address contemporary social and political conditions, Duval-Carrié is presenting a series of large-scale paintings and sculptures.
Contrasting his signature use of strong colors, this project presents works executed entirely in black and silver glitter. Involving extensive research, Imagined Landscapes presents lush tropical scenes that reference specific nineteenth-century paintings executed in the Caribbean and Florida. These paintings, by artists such as Martin Johnson Heade and Frederic Edwin Church, were commissioned as part of Colonial interests in promoting economic development of these areas of the world. The artists used pictorial effects, imagination and fictions to present the Caribbean as the “New Eden,” a fertile land of possibility. Duval-Carrié’s works translate these historical images into his own contemporary aesthetic language, in order to address the manner in which the tropics of the Caribbean and Florida continue to be sold as tropical paradises, in ways that often obscure economic and social disparities that continue to be perpetuated in these contexts.
