There’s a quote. Can I say it in French?

Mais oui.

So it’s Maximilien Laroche talking about mythologie haïtienne. He says: N’est donc pas caméléon uniquement celui qui se déguise. L’est tout autant celui qui lève les masques au fur et à mesure qu’un autre les pose.

Can you translate?

He’s talking about the chameleon. And he’s basically saying that the chameleon is not only the one that is disguising himself. Or in order to remove the disguises, you have to be a chameleon yourself as well.

Interesting.

Painting for me is kind of like finding this choreography. Internally, my career is dedicated to the freedom and the emancipation of myself externally. I’m an ambassador for my culture, you know? And I think that you have to be you can’t not perform. That’s why I like to work on large formats, because it feels like I’m dancing. I have to be in the flow of myself. I have to be in tune with my truth at the moment, otherwise, my strokes won’t work for me, you know? It’s a physical performance that is generating the idea of my performance for the ultimate goal, which is soft power: Haiti’s stance on the geopolitical map.

I think when you come from Haiti, there’s a lot of expectation in your social and political environment, whether from your upbringing or what the western world expects from you. So I think it’s about going back to the tradition of seeking for freedom. The freedom to to express whatever. To trust your individuality, to express yourself and to not answer to those expectations. I think it is part of—how can I phrase this? It’s about having the freedom to trust your perspective on the world and not follow the discourse—or try to go against the discourse because going against the discourse is also a form of tying yourself in too. It’s about trying to protect that freedom of trusting the way you look at the world and your own perspective on the world and not follow those expectations. I think as a Haitian, there’s a trap of posturing. I think a lot of that posturing comes from trying to talk about every issue all the time. There’s always new conflicts or new catastrophes that people expect a certain answer to. But I think cultivating true freedom is the most ancient thing to do. And that has been the tradition of Haitian artists [by going] very abstract and colorful.

In relation to that history and the situation in Haiti, is painting something that can access a new possible choreography of the country? Or is it new?

I don’t think it’s new.

I’m not gonna say that our thinking or way of creating is new, however, it fits into a lineage of resistance.

That’s something that I do a lot in my way of thinking about images and painting: I use Haitian art history. Like when I look at the work of the “great primitives” as they called them like Hector Hyppolite, or classical painters like Jean Claude Legagneur—these are people that purposely created a resistance to their beauty, they created a resistance to their spirituality, they created a resistance to, sometimes, their vanity. So, I see myself as part of that current of thought. Painters, in particular—and writers also—very often offer an alternative way of seeing the world. A very honest way of looking at the world. SoI think it’s a lineage and I’m definitely using painting to celebrate parts of Haiti. I also know that painting is universal because I come from a place where a lot of people don’t read, however, they feel a painting when they see it. And that’s very important to me to be able to have that universal way of expressing myself. And painting helps me do that. So yes, my performance has to do with the creation, history and the survival of the ancient spirit. That’s just the nature of it. And its evolution, also. How it’s conversing with Western art history, how other artists inform the world, how it’s responding to the society we’re living in right now—in Canada, in Montreal, in Haiti. 

It’s interesting that the progenitor of the notion of freedom and early modernity is actually Haiti.

I see my posture more as a stance, and the choreography as a performance, and that goes for my art practice as well as my response to political structures and so on. Where I put my gaze, I have a stance. That stance allows me to perform in a certain way; it allows me to repeat some gestures much like choreography. I think it’s inherent to the human experience: we stand in a [certain] way, and we perform in another way—sometimes based on that way we stand. So that’s what comes to my mind.

In my life experience, posture and choreography are politicized. As a trans person, you have to do the work of removing your mask. I have been performing masculinity—I had been performing masculinity for years. So, my transition was to stop performing masculinity and to start performing femininity. 

Because I was born here in Canada and then I moved to Haiti when I was pretty young, the code switching was often first here: between my posture at home and outside. When I moved to Haiti, I also changed social class and my environment changed. And I couldn’t play those same roles when I was in Canada because the reality of the country is not the same. So I had two different sides, let’s say. I had to perform different identities depending on where I was. And I learned pretty quickly to learn the different codes. Like I had to accept that [in Haiti,] I was part of the upper middle class, very quickly. And then coming back and dealing with entering the Black community—that has different issues, but are not necessarily mine. So there’s always a different aspect of what Blackness or Haitian means. Being Haitian doesn’t mean the same thing when you’re in Montreal.

I feel like there’s more freedom in the abstraction freedom—I like the idea of not knowing where I’m going. Yeah, I like that idea. I don’t know. Like some people trace their abstract paintings. I like to just let the water decide something alive. Water does the water designs in my paintings. It’s a living element, being able to decide for you and that’s more freedom than saying: Okay, I’m gonna do a painting about this guy on his horse. I’m talking about decolonization. I’m talking about the history of geopolitics. I’m trying to not have to react to the system or the Empire. In abstraction you have the freedom of just creating your own narrative without risking someone using your image for their political agenda. So yeah, it’s kind of a freedom of just staying away from misinterpretation.

What’s figurative about my painting is the matter itself: yellow is yellow, green is green, red is red.  Those variable things are the only figurative thing in my painting. Everything else that I tried to do with those things is an abstraction. That’s how I perceive it. And a lot of images that are considered abstract have elements that bring you into a figurative mindset. And a lot of paintings that are considered figurative brings you into an abstracted world. I also want to add to what CP said about how figuration gives you a narrative, which may or may not be politicized—but I think abstraction also is a way of being of political mind, not political. You can say, for example, that you don’t feel anything when you look at a painting because that’s the only an abstraction of colors. Toothpaste. I called a toothpaste painting. I’m trying to make fillings out of it. I’m trying to create meaning out of it. I’m trying to create images out of it. And all those things are going to be an abstraction of blue or red, of yellow, of, of brown or whatever. So it’s, for me, it is a matter of getting to know paint.

There’s so much posturing in everything now: representation, symbolism, subtext—there’s always layers of meaning. And I think, with artists like Clovis and CP, when they do those abstractions they might want to say something, but they express it in the truest way possible. There’s an attempt to remove a level of ideology in the process. I know “authentic” is used a lot but I think there’s an authenticity in the process. You have to work on those layers of how people understand certain signals and how those signals might be interpreted. It becomes more complex and conceptual. You can get lost in that process. So, let’s say, what’s figurative is the color: How do you represent it? How do you make an interpretation of that? How do you build a discourse with that? I think when people see that something is more abstract, [they think] it’s hard to understand, but I think it’s actually more direct than that. Yeah, I think it might not be as straightforward as an answer. There’s an authenticity in the abstract, that it’s harder to find in figurative because of those layers of discourse and ideology.

It’s just crazy that this conversation is not going on regularly. And I mean, we know why we’re not stupid.

Well, it’s part of the performance of the system, to not have these conversations. It would disrupt the choreography, the plan, the colonial choreography.