Haitian painter, born in December 1968 in Cap-Haïtien.
Life
The son of an architect and a nurse, Frantz Zéphirin was brought up by his grandmother, an embroiderer; as a very small child he was already drawing flower motifs. He began painting in 1973, at the age of five, with his uncle, the painter Antoine Obin, a master of the Cap-Haïtien school. At seven he was selling small landscapes to tourists from cruise ships.
In 1983 he went to continue his schooling in Port-au-Prince, then gave up his studies to devote himself to painting and joined the Galerie Monnin. From 1988, at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, he asserted his own themes and style. A Vodou priest, he lives and works in his temple, the Temple of the Seven Virgins, on a mountain above Mariani, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.
The work
Zéphirin draws on history, politics, the environment, the Bible, Creole culture and Vodou. His dense, brightly coloured compositions bring together human figures with the heads of wild or domestic animals (monkeys, elephants, crocodiles, giraffes), mystical characters and parallel worlds. Through them he caricatures Haitian society, and above all its ruling class. He describes himself as a “historical animalist”.
His paintings have been on the covers of The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine.
Exhibitions and collections
- Swiss Prize and European Prize for modern primitive painting, Kasper Pro Arte, Morges (Switzerland), 1994; gold medal at the 3rd Biennial of Caribbean and Central American Painting, Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, 1996.
- Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, 1995, then a tour of the United States.
- Le dernier voyage d’André Malraux en Haïti, Musée du Montparnasse, Paris, 2009.
- Kafou: Haiti, Art & Vodou, Nottingham Contemporary, 2012-2013; In Extremis, Fowler Museum, UCLA, 2012-2013.
- Collections: Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal (Netherlands).