Edouard Duval-Carrié: Imagined Landscapes

Edouard Duval-Carrié, After Church–Mystic Lagoon, 2013, mixed media on aluminum, 96” x 144.” Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ralph Torres

Pérez Art Museum Miami

By Ashley Knight

“Imagined Landscapes” is a solo exhibition of new works by Haitian-born, Miami-based artist Edouard Duval-Carrié. The show features a series of mural-sized paintings and chandeliers, created over the past year and conceived as a single installation that depicts lush tropical scenes executed entirely in black and silver glitter. Duval Carrié is a well-known name in Caribbean contemporary art. He innovatively appropriates traditional Haitian iconography to address contemporary social and political issues that affect the region. Contrasting his signature use of strident colors, this new project is executed in a more somber palette. “Imagined Landscapes” is the result of an extensive research that delves into 19th-century paintings executed in the Caribbean and Florida. Painters such as Martin Johnson Heade and Frederic Edwin Church were commissioned as part of Colonialist interests in promoting economic development of these areas of the world. Through pictorial effects, imagination and fictional scenes, these artists presented a vision of the Caribbean as the “New Eden.” 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 by mass media and tourist agencies in ways that often hide economic and social disparities that continue to be a constant in these contexts. Through August 14, 2014.