Hervé Télémaque

Hervé Télémaque (5 November 1937 – 10 November 2022) was a French painter of Haitian origin, associated with the surrealism and the narrative figuration movements. He lived and worked in Paris from 1961 on. Télémaque was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Following a health problem, he had to give up his hopes of competing in sports. In 1957, when François Duvalier came to power, he left Haiti for New York City and joined the Art Student's League until 1960, when his teacher, the painter Julian Levi, encouraged his artistic vocation. During his stay in the United States, where he frequented museums, he was simultaneously intellectually nourished by abstract expressionism, then surrealism, as used and reinterpreted by American artists (De Kooning, Lam, etc.), and in particular by the influence of Arshile Gorky. As early as 1959, his painting entitled Sirène (Musée Sainte-Croix) marked his uniqueness. Télémaque wanted to be reality-based and escape abstraction: even the title refers to his daily life, evoking the boats sirens he heard from his room in Brooklyn Heights. With L'Annonce faite à Marie (Musée des beaux-arts de Dole, FNAC), which recalls his marriage the same year with Maël Pilié, the theme of sexuality, especially present at the beginning of his work, is announced (Histoire sexuelle, 1960 ; Ciel de lit n°3, 1962, Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain de Nice ; Femme merveille, 1963,Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne). He was disappointed by the segregationist atmosphere in the United States1. (Toussaint Louverture in New York, 1960, Dole Museum). In 1961, he came to France and settled in Paris. He frequented the surrealists there, without formally joining the group. But it was in the precepts of population art (comic strip, use of the episcope, then in 1966 use of acrylic) that he truly found his very particular way, while defending European creation, more critical of society.