Andre pierre haitian artist casimir

Take Grand Bois (), with its overlap of fluid, gesticulating branches of the tree/God; or Imamou (s), the stature and mysterious prominence of the rooster looking on/in at the ceremony for Agoue, the Haitian God of water.

What we meet in these paintings is a Vodou reality; a reality where principles such as depth, perspective, proportion, and harmony are not determined by how one believes the hubristic, biological “human” eye sees. The arrangement of all created things takes its cue from the presence of the divine, which—though present in all things—manifests strongly in one or another figure in each work.

In several of André Pierre’s paintings, we encounter what I feel to be the “vertical pressure” of a sensibility still rooted in the centrality of the divine and the commonplace descent of the divine onto the earthly plane.

This vertical pressure is most palpably rendered through the metaphor and axis and axiom of the poto mitan (the central pole) w