Haitian sculptor Ti Pèlen, whose delivery title is Jean Salomon Horace, died final month on the age of 66. His explanation for demise stays undisclosed.
His household will protect the remaining artworks in his possession, in response to a spokesperson for Pioneer Works, which featured his work in a 2018 exhibition on Port-au-Prince artists.
Pèlen’s carved stone sculptures—outsized heads with serene expressions—had been a centerpiece of Pòtoprens: The City Artists of Port-au-Prince, a survey of latest Haitian artists. A New York Occasions overview described the presence of the carvings as a “carnivalesque antidote to the classical sculpture courts of Western museums.”
The exhibition spotlighted members of the Atis Rezistans collective, together with Jean Hérard Céleur, André Eugène, Guyodo (Frantz Jacques), and Evel Romain. Although not a part of the group, Pèlen was a identified determine within the neighboring grassroots motion of Rivière Froide, a riverside city in Port-au-Prince, the place he was born, lived, and labored.
In an announcement to ARTnews, Pioneer Works’ inventive director Gabriel Florenz recalled that when visiting his studio, he requested Pèlen how he conceived his stone sculptures. Pèlen replied that concepts usually got here to him in goals and visions throughout walks alongside the river. “He is likely one of the most mystical artists I’ve ever met,” Florenz mentioned.
Raised by Protestant dad and mom who labored as a gardener and a market employee, Pèlen was enthusiastic about non secular traditions exterior of his household’s beliefs, in response to a 2018 interview printed in exhibition supplies for the New York present. He turned in the direction of working with stone, broadly obtainable in Rivière Froide, and commenced sculpting within the Nineteen Seventies alongside Jean Camille Nasson, who died in 2008.
Reflecting on his work in the identical interview, one of many few Pèlen did, he described an virtually passive artistic course of, guided by shifts within the climate and native components: “Typically, even I don’t perceive how I made them.”
