Célestin Faustin’s 1979 painting Pourtant ma Maison est Vide captures a world steeped in spirituality, fantasy, eroticism, and metaphysical dilemma. Demonstrating Faustin’s technical virtuosity and vivid imagination, the work represents an extraordinary dimension of 20th -century Haitian art inspired by Vodou, the spiritual belief system with roots in West African religions, Catholicism, Islam, European folklore, and freemasonry, in tandem with Haiti’s Indigenous Taíno religions. Working among a generation that followed the “Haitian Renaissance,” Faustin portrays the lived experience of the mythical and spiritual that has actively shaped Haitian life. Faustin may have not approached political events directly, but his surreal visions of spiritual paradise, such as the 1979 painting Jardin d’Eden, express a haunted poetry of being alive. In Pourtant ma Maison est Vide, hallucinations dissolve into a surreal landscape populated in the foreground by two blue and bald nude figures who together prepare for the ceremonial slaughter of a sheep. A ghostly woman stands at the door of a hut as a man with a machete hurries into the shadowy mountains. As the Martinican intellectual Édouard Glissant reflected, “Myth anticipates history as much as it inevitably repeats the accidents that it has glorified; that means that it is in turn a producer of history.”
Madeline Weisburg
