exhibition EDOUARD DUVAL-CARRIÉ LET US DECOLONIZE REFINEMENT

Édouard Duval-Carrié disrupts this logic with a practice that, while deeply rooted in Haiti’s symbolic universe, can also be seen as “the reinvention of novelty”— comprised of repetitions, adaptations, and breaks, but also multiplicity. The works presented in this exhibition contribute to an overthrow of the past that has been deliberately created by the artist in an attempt to establish a distinct visual vocabulary expressing the history of the Caribbean. This history is not a burden, but rather an active memory and a liberation that allows us to face the present.

Édouard Duval-Carrié is also interested in the way the human entity has become the engine of his own destruction. He presents hybrid men, devoid of human flesh, with plants growing out of their heads. These are adaptations of the Soukougnan, an evil creature from Caribbean mythology who sheds his skin to seek his victims. Edouard Duval-Carrié has reinvented the Soukougnan as a creature whose absence of flesh reveals the presence of our ills. Have humans been disfigured by their attempts to control nature? And do these attempts relate to the disastrous ecological consequences faced by us and by the world we live in? These questions bring us back to Edouard Duval-Carrié’s concern for the present, and to the way he experiments with and reconfigures different aspects of the Caribbean’s symbolic order.