Celestin Faustin

Celestin Faustin learned painting in his youth from one of Haiti’s masters Wilmino Domond.  Domond painted two dimensional canvasses in sharp colors, his main inspiration coming from the Voodoo religion.  At first, Celestin Faustin followed in his teacher’s footsteps, but he quickly found his own voice.  In his book, “Where Art is Joy.  Haitian Arts: The First Forty Years,”  Selden Rodman describes Celestin Faustin as “Haiti’s first authentic surrealist.”   Surrealism, a cultural movement that started in the 1920s, wanted to shock by combining startling or disconnected images in all areas of artistic endeavors (films, literature, paintings).  Such goals are exemplified in Faustin’s painting “Recherche du Chatiment” (Search for Punishment.) The juxtaposition of incongruous details such as a rat, a drum, a man with a machete, are set in a nightmarish background and fronted by the haunting eye of a face without jaws.  Celestin Faustin became famous in the late 1960’s when the Haitian’s Galerie Claire (Claire Gallery) started to display his paintings.  Some of his work is in permanent collections in the Milwaukee museum in the USA and the Jaeger’s collection in Germany.  Celestin Faustin was born in Jacmel, Haiti in 1948 and passed away of a heroin overdose in 1981.


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