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The work of Solanges Jolicoeur

The work of Solanges Jolicoeur baffles, disconcerts and then fascinates, although at first glance she seems familiar to us,close to what we’ve agreed to call “Haitian Impressionism”; close also to a certain type of primitive painting because of the intensity of its colors and the sonority of its harmonies.

She offers herself like a fireworks display, an explosion of strong colors. The most powerful palettes of yellow, of red, of blue, used pure in audacious juxtapositions sustained only by specks of violet, of green, and splashes of white. Thus tempered, the dissonances grow silent. And find ample harmonies, though slightly soured, sumptuous, subtly impregnated with a troubling sensuality.

The approach, however, is different. The primitive painters loved large, flat, uniformly colored surfaces with deep resonances, quasi-infinite. Without anything that could attenuate their brightness. Without the “intervention” of “complementary,” salutary combinations. The amazing thing is the facility with which they succeeded in balancing their masses, in softening their brilliance, in rendering their harmonies acceptable, though at first they were judged impossible. With the indefinable poetic accents that spontaneity and the lack of traditional “savoir-faire” carries off.

So Solanges Jolicoeur, refusing the light touch and glazes, delights in sticky surfaces, working rather often with a knife; if, as to modulate the surfaces, she breaks up the strokes, wanting them here to be large and uneven, there contained and effaced like a series of light scratches, she never thinks to challenge this optical mélange. The discipline of the brush, the density of the stroke, the deciding presence of the line that surrounds the forms and makes them specific, all this sets her apart from Haitian Impressionism without opening her very much to expressionism in a bewildering outpouring of passions or of emotions. Everything is well controlled, too well mastered to ally itself with an “anything goes” approach.

The subject. Is it of any importance? Landscapes, interior scenes, portraits. The representation, which seems to repeat itself with only slight changes in nuance, is intentionally soft and light. Simple variations on the same theme, or a subject that is a pretext for the free play of color. For all that, one need not get caught up in the play, and far from being a simple plastic arrangement, the work moves in a frightful uproar. Its terrain represses the cries and shrieks only with difficulty. A disquieting world of understandings that leaves the greatest liberty to our imagination. And is woven from restrained outbursts. Like aborted dreams that the memory tries vainly to reconstruct. A world of tension that borders on the tragic. A world where life, without going completely mad, rises up in a glimmer of fire. Calm? Serenity falsely at the gate? Or stifled sobs to overcome incoherences and turpitudes? A world where finally unhappiness even denied is more probable than happi!
ness. And where nothing is any longer sure. The characters seem even to doubt their own existence.

Fascinating work. Especially surprising since she keeps away from the actual tendencies of Haitian art to lose the sense of strong tones, heightened by the temptation to gray backgrounds and softer harmonies. When she doesn’t get bogged down in tachism or informal abstraction, or when she doesn’t privilege the object to the point of conferring on it a truth that is quasi-photographic.

Between tachism and hyperrealism there is much space for a more frank, more personal statement. Beyond the acquired technique that has won real mastery for her, with the work of Solanges Jolicoeur it’s the reserved expression of emotions that retains the attention. A troubling song that, once heard, can be forgotten only with difficulty.

That is what makes her painting so captivating.

~Michel Philippe Lerebours