Selle [Saddle], from Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A.: 15 Years of Graphic Work

Beginning in the early 1960s, Hervé Télémaque used a deceptively cartoonish visual style informed by popular culture to launch critiques of French imperialism in his native Haiti and the racism he encountered while living in New York City. These concerns aligned him with the Surrealist group in Paris, where he settled in 1961.

This image of a saddle hovers between abstraction and figuration. Its resistance to immediate reading reflects the artist’s interest in the multiple connotations of the saddle as object, a “power” that Télémaque credited Surrealist touchstone Giorgio de Chirico with revealing to him. It may allude to Afro-Haitian Vodou practices, in which spirits are described as “riding” the people they possess, called chwal or “horses” in Creole (a key image for Télémaque’s friend Wifredo Lam as well).