Hervé Télémaque presents « A Hopscotch of the Mind » at the Serpentine South Gallery in London

The Serpentine South Gallery of London offers to its public the discovery of the works of Hervé Télémaque under the theme « A Hopscotch of the Mind » until January 30, 2022

Hervé Télémaque, who since the latter part of the 1950s has produced a vast collection of works with a new and lively visual jargon, including dynamic cues, animations such as symbolism, and mixed media compositions.  

Through paintings, drawings, collages and assemblages, he brings together striking mixtures of chronic and scholarly references with those of society’s consumer. By fusing images and encounters from his daily existence, Hervé Télémaque’s vast collection of works establishes reliable associations between the realms of inner knowledge, social experience, and the complex links between image and language.

Born in 1937 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Hervé Télémaque left for New York in 1957 and entered an artistic milieu overwhelmed by abstract expressionism. In 1961, he moved permanently to Paris, joining the Surrealists and later helping to establish the development of Figuration Narrative in France with Gérald Gassiot-Talabot and the artist Bernard Rancillac.

In response to the prevailing trend toward abstraction and the development of Pop in North America, Hervé Télémaque’s Figuration Narrative regularly produces works of Pop reasonableness that fuse objects and signs. Hervé Télémaque then demonstrates an astute critique of these images, creating works in exchange for recent events, such as the Cold War, the Cuban missile emergency, the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, and contemporary French legislative issues.

A sincere obligation to highlight contemporary narratives and resonances of domination and imperialism remains a constant throughout his vocation, with works that account for the deceptive ways in which these constructs continue to saturate our daily existences.

In his later works, Hervé Télémaque alludes more directly to his Haitian heritage and his experience as a member of the Caribbean diaspora.

« A Hopscotch of the Mind » is Télémaque’s first institutional exhibition in the United Kingdom. It brings together works produced from the latter part of the 1950s to the present, showcasing the enduring themes of the artist’s work through his multi-layered practice.  

Rather than adopting a sequential strategy, « A Hopscotch of the Mind » offers a non-direct investigation of visual jargon and allows visitors to bounce between media and time periods, shaping their own relationship between the dissimilar pieces of his singular portrait.