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Since she was tree years old, artist Marie-Denise
Douyon has been a traveler. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1961,
she left Haiti with her parents to escape Fran¨ois Duvalier's
reign of terror. She spent her childhood in Morocco and later
moved to the United States where she attended university.
Since 1990, she has made Montreal her home.
En route, Douyon absorbed the visual vocabulary
of various cultures. Today, she has infused elements of those
cultures into her mixed-media paintings. But unlike artists
such as Picasso and Miro, who first embraced, then borrowed
(or as some claimed "stole ") the formal elements of African
art, what Douyon revisits and reclaims has at the same time
always been a part of her.
For her exhibit Proverbiart, currently
showing at the Galerie d'art d'Outremont, she freely quotes
from traditional African art-and traditional Western painting
as well-to speak about a range of subjects from racism to
love and passion, slavery and servitude.
Like fleeting memories of far-away places
and events, Douyon's art is made of fragments, pieced together
somewhere like a mosaic. Eyes, faces and symbols such as stylized
horse and rider appears as if they were captured from other
contexts and than glued on paper.
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Several of Douyon's works are presented
as triptychs. Here, white mats divide the works into strips,
seeming to mask parts of the images. The obscured parts become
affecting simply because they're concealed. Viewing these
pieces is a little like looking at a painting from behind
bars. The eye is disconcerted and wants to reunite the image.
At the same time, the framed segments can be viewed separately,
almost like strips of cloth laid on fresh snow.
In Le masque de l'amour, the torso of a
woman is divided into two parts. Each section contains one
eye and one breast. The woman's strong, solid shape recalls
a wooden African sculpture. But Douyon, by dividing the figure,
makes the woman seems more vulnerable. As in the many of her
works, the background is covered with calligraphic text that
reads like microscopic organisms floating in polluted water,
or the after images when watching fireworks.
In a series of three similar works all
titled "Le silence répond oui," the silhouette
of an African sclupture is set apart from the rest of the
works. This male figure stands alone against a cool green
background. The other three-
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quarters of the
image are composed of a woman's face and the silhouette of a
lizard. Like the male image, the lizards are printed without
detail. Instead, they are the imprints, like marks left in sand
or the memory of a dream.
Douyon pulls the fragments together through
repetition and her way with colour. Though the works are mixed
media on paper, Douyon's confident and passionate use of colour
makes them appear more like dyed silk. From a distance, the
colours glisten like the sun reflecting off water. As a group,
they speak about other places, other times.
Lorrie Blair
The Mirror,
Montreal, April 1998
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