25933: Burl (announce) Fwd: Re: Lecture to Dallas Museum of Art (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: burl <burl@ntelos.net>

-from:
http://galeriedartnader.com/art_review.htm

"In December 1981, then a medical doctor in Marbial, small locality in the
southeast of Haiti, the tam-tams, I remember would resound unceasingly for
three days and three nights. A few miles from there was dying the most famous
and unhappiest son of this town,the painter Celestin Faustin. Because, famous,
Celestin would very soon be, and I predict that every day his fame will grow-
if genius must lead fatally to glory. Unhappy, Faustin will also be from the
beginning. Because, destined from his early youth to the most redoutable of
the goddesses, Erzulie Dantor, Faustin will never accept that consecration,
neither besides will he accept his homosexuality, which he will always see and
blame as a vengeance of the gods. And it is true that one must have lived from
a very tender age in haiti, to comprehend the degree of latent terror that
these canvases contain. Because here the entire space is hallucinated. The
tone is sometimes of a violent red, it is more often than not blue, but this
color, in principle, the most reposeful, carries a worrisome connotation,
since it is also the color of the fearless Erzulie Dantor. Here, nothing is
pure, nothing is serene. The outstretched arms seem to curse; architectural
forms are crushing us; there is not a fragment of the canvas that doesn't ooze
an odor of sulfur, not a corner of escape, not a zone that doesn't lead to
another world just as malevolent, just as malefic. Man, isolated, lost in the
pain of his wounds, looks for his safety, and all he finds is terror, and
finally inexorable condemnation."