Born in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, into a wealthy and cultured mestizo family, at the age of twenty Telemac, fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship, decided to settle in New York, where he studied at the Art Students League and lived. The emergence of Abstract Expressionism (via Max Pinchinat, its echoes have already reached the island), with an interest in the pioneer Arschile Gorky, but also in the pre-pop Rauschenberg. The difficulty of surviving in a racist environment such as North America would end in driving him, in 1961, to Paris, where he was conspicuous to the end, where he would live until his death in the last ten years.
In 1963 Télémaque was among the contributors to the magazine “Kwy” by René Bertholo and Lourdes Castro. And André Breton, who learned about him from Edouard Jagore, will soon welcome him to the surrealist group, including in the group “L’écart Absolu” (1965) by L’Oeil. He collaborated on “La Brèche” and “L’Archibras”. However, by that time he was already doing pop music with a strong critical charge, with many references to colonialism. In 1964 we find him, with Bertholo, Claassen, Rancilac and Jan Vos, illustrating the collection of poems “Royal Garden Blues” by Jean-Jacques Lévèque; Among the participants in the collective “Mythologies quotidiennes” at MoMA; Among those summoned to documenta in Kassel. It was also the year of his first two solo performances: in Paris (Matthias Wels) and London (Hanover, with catalog prepared by John Ashbery). Passionate about frivolity and clear calligraphy, and about the Belgian Magritte too, he painted at that time large, scattershot pictures (sometimes close to his friend Fhlström), chromatically intense, and sometimes very funny, as he himself was. Fine. That he never lost touch with the Haitian cultural fabric is proved by the fact that, together with his friends Lamm and Camacho, he illustrated a Bible version of Dialogue de mes lampes (1970), by Clément Magloire Saint-Aude, the most Mallarmos of the surrealist poets; I remember a conversation on this subject with the painter, full of zigzags, in a wine bar on Rue Petit in Cherche-Midi.
Serge Vouchereau, Yves Michaud, Bernard Noel, José Pierre, Anne Tronch, or Carlos Franchi (writer of the preface to the catalog of his first Spanish single, held in Barcelona in 1977, in Joan Prats) wrote important texts on Télémaque, among which surveys of the past stand out From 1976 at the Musée d’Art Moderne, one from 1998 at IVAM, one from 2015 at MNAM in Paris and then the Cantini in Marseille, one from 2016 in Martinique, which, after being able to see it in 2021 at the London Serpentine which opened in The fourth is in the museum in Aspen, Colorado. Unfortunately now that he is dead, on the 28th, another gallery has just opened at the ICA in Miami, focused on his New York productions.
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