Hervé Télémaque

Herve Télémaque was born in Port-au-Prince on November 5, 1937. In 1957, he left Haiti and went to New York, where he joined the Art Student's League and studied with Julian Levi until 1960. During his stay in the United States, he is simultaneously inspired by the abstract expressionism that was dominating the art world at the time and by surrealism, as it had been reinterpreted and exploited by the American artists, particularly under the influence of Arshile Gorky. But it is with Pop Art that he truly finds his path. He came back to France in 1961 and settled in Paris. He meets Surrealist artists, but doesn't formally join their group.

Télémaque composes his own visual vocabulary. His paintings depict ordinary objects: white canes, tennis shoes, camping tents. He is part of the "narrative figuration" adventure, that of artists such as Klasen, Monory, Rancillac, Fahlström, that art critic Gerald Gassiot-Talabot brought together in 1964 in the exhibition entitled "Mythologies quotidiennes".