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… The world that Johnson painted in Florence that year – a supernaturally colored domain comprised of regal, yet humble, black women installed on porches, children at play and at rest, and flowers in riotous, full bloom – was, at once, familiar and outlandish, connecting the artist to the ultimate locus of origin: mother; while envisioning that same, fundamental life source within a part cultural, part invented space of impromptu games, performed rituals, imparted legacies, and constantly changing scenery. Like the “too-big-to-be-breast-fed” child in Johnson’s Maternal, the artist returned in 1944 to the comforting, all embracing arms of home, partaking of not only the emotional sustenance of the female element, but of the vertigo-inducing experience of self-consciousness, of finally grasping one’s purpose in life even if it meant the proverbial reentry into the symbolic womb: in this instance, Johnson’s primal, African American folk roots. Although it was practically second nature for this Expressionist to feel his way through the world, and to visually cast it in the operative role of emotional vehicle for his art, it was another matter altogether for the bereft and distraught Johnson to totally immerse himself in the maternal lap and bosom of Alice/Florence, and to transform his temporary asylum and sanctuary into a new and, arguably, more honest mode of modern painting.

Every intermittent sighting of Barkley L. Hendricks’s work over the past few decades has been a revelation. Paintings previously seen (and about which I claimed some critical expertise) were invariably a surprise and an art historical conundrum to behold again and again. The particular modes of dress to which Hendricks’s subjects subscribed were not only a lens onto a prior history of fashion and style, but a close-up view of the multiplicity of personas that Hendricks and his subjects adopted, outwardly crying out it seemed for post-portrait examinations. The few recognizable subjects in paintings whom I later met and had a chance to compare to their artistic portrayals always elicited a barrage of questions in my mind (re: What were the circumstances of the picture?  How does the subject feel about his/her portrayal?  Who is really calling the shots here?). Much of this work has been in existence since the 1960s and, yet, its pictorial weight and eternal allure is a mystery in today’s guileless world of visual excess and hyper-visibility.

In his collection of essays, Caribbean Discourse, ´Edouard Glissant describes the Creole languages and literatures of the French Antilles and the pedagogical projects that strive to bring greater understanding and appreciation to créolitié as an “exploded discourse.” In Glissant’s thinking, the ruptures and disassembling in vernacular speech in the Francophone Caribbean result in an “exemplary phenomenon,” a “counterpoetics,” and a “compact mass, pushing us through a dimension of emptiness where we must with difficulty and pain put it all back together.” Glissant’s idea of fractured yet imaginative Creole communiqués have a counterpart in the paintings, sculptures, and collages of the Haitian-born, Paris-based artist Hervé Télémaque (b. 1937). After studying in the mid-1950s at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Télémaque moved to New York City, where he attended the Art Students League and embraced abstract expressionism. By 1961, Télémaque had relocated to Paris, where his first paintings produced there brought him much success. Télémaque’s subsequent career, during which he took up structuralist, poststructuralist, and postmodernist modes of image making, not only garnered broad institutional recognition and critical accolades, but also situated him within the French art historical modernist canon and a cultural field that one might describe as black Atlantic, global in scope and discursively cosmopolitan. This article summarily tracks Hervé Télémaque’s sixty-plus-year career: a path where his artistic practices harken back to Glissant’s theories of an insurgent creolité and produce uncharted, creative passageways in concert with his fellow wayfarers throughout the greater African diaspora.