NEXUS II

Press Release

NEXUS II
Paul C. Gardere
Helen Evans Ramsaran
Freddy Rodriquez

Curator: Carl E. Hazlewood

October 18th – November 17th, 2001

Press Release

Apart from the exotic dreams of tourists seduced in the face of lush beauty, the Caribbean and distant territories of the Americas exist for its inhabitants mostly as sites of existential promises and thwarted possibilities. The New World’s history as a theatre for European ambition, hunger and desire has left its stamp upon the faces and tongues of the people and has set in continuous motion erratic cross-currents of blood and culture which, even now, determines how the present is made real.

NEXUS II: TRANSFORMATION / TRANSFIGURATION is a further inquiry into the knot of influences informing the work of three artists of Caribbean and American heritage who first exhibited together in an exhibition at PS 122 in 1989.

The social, political and artistic environment has been altered somewhat since the last time they showed together, but the frames each artist works within has remained relatively consistent. While the production of Haitian-born Paul Claude Gardere, Helen Evans Ramsaran of the US, and Freddy Rodriguez, originally from The Dominican Republic, recognizes the pervasive influence of international modernism and post-modernism, each artist draws upon an individual reserve of personal history to activate a meaningful form which might communicate beyond a trite and superficial globalism.

Paul Claude Gardere’s year-long sojourn at Monet’s Garden in Giverny, France resulted in a series of complex paintings and assemblage with enigmatic narratives that reenvision the trans-cultural nature of Caribbean history and experience. Grounded in veve, a traditional element of Haitian vodun religion, Gardere’s work builds upon a complex symbolic structure which takes into account both the endless social and political tragedy of the region, as well as its startling beauty.

The sculptor Helen Evans Ramsaran, has spent much time abroad, most recently in Africa. She distills the essence of African or other cultures to derive a personal idiom. Her forms are suggestively organic. Her bronze enclosures, based upon African architecture, often have the presence of living bodies. Shrines, amulets and other objects are infused with strange metaphysical significance; they seem like fosselized detritus left over from some timeless religious ritual.

Alternately narrative and reductive, Freddy Rodriguez reaches for a difficult kind of essentialized morality. But how does one represent this as a pictorial value? One recent series concerned the late Dominican dictator Trujillo; another was about the “paradise lost” of the Caribbean. The main task Rodriguez sets for himself is how to employ the nuanced possibilities of abstract painting for both narrative and formal effect.

Despite difference in style, language and national origins, what these artists have demonstrated is an abiding confidence that visual images can still communicate powerful emotional and spiritual values in addition to formal aesthetic quality.