Schnelange Valcin
Art-Expo Valcin II, Inc
P.O.Box 290947
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813-263-6345

Antonio Joseph ! Antonio Joseph "Born in Dominican Republic of Haitian parents (Antonio Joseph) there learned the cut and the music. He left the Dominican one in 1938 during the massacre of the Haitian who took place in 1936 in this country. In Haiti Mr. Joseph earned his living by exerting its trade of tailor and when the center of Art opened its doors in 1944, he became member and studied about it the watercolour with Dewitt Peters the sculpture with Jason Seley the mural techniques with WilliamCalfee, the silk scroon with Robel Paris, ceramics with Edith Wegand and casein with Paul Keene.

Little after its marriage in 1953, Mr. Joseph accepted a grant of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and came to the United States for one year, but today, it is accompanied by his wife. Six months ago since Mr. Joseph lives in New York, it paints and visits the museums and art galleries ". (27) Ainsi had been introduced Antonio Joseph by Rockland Country Journal New stressing its serious formation and clearly leaving which one did not have to seek in his art "instinctives' qualities '. When, one tells, after a few weeks of absence, Antonio Joseph returned in the Center of Art where it had followed some courses of drawing and prospect, bearing under the arm a shirt full with watercolours, it surprised and charms Dewitt Peters and the "advanced" artists more by the smoothness and the innovation of its style. There remained faithful to the principles of the indigenism as accepted and preached by the Center of Art. While showing already technical solids knowledge, to paint the Haitian countryside and the cankered districts of Port-with-Prince, it had known to give itself so disconcerting accents and so personnel that its art, separating cold objectivity, seemed to open on a new apprehension of reality. It combed according to nature but did not remain prisoner of his visual feelings.

Going beyond appearances, it invited to include/understand and sympathize. It had suffered, it had known the anguish and the despair of the life of the ghettos, its vision was initially an interiorized vision. It regained the shapes, curved them, stretched them, broke their offset, obliged them to be driven and speak. It did not shock. On the contrary. Delicately posed, diluted, as devoured by the tropical sun, its subtle colours created a strange poetry and softened without erasing it the tragedy of the situations. Not that it was opposed to the bitterness and guaranteed resignation but it did not preach the revolt. It rather seemed to beseech a glance of commiseration for the patients, the famished ones, the loqueteux ones, all those which struggled impotent, captive of the inhuman conditions which were made to them. Little time after (its arrival in the Center of Art), one wrote of him: "It created its unreal reality to express the pain in a life or miseries of the social existence do not arise more as stimulants at a creative effort but as of realities to which we must conform (28). Watercolours exposed in March 1945 to the sides of those of George Remponneau, some, especially Return of Work, Restaurant of the Poor, Small Houses, the deadened Worker showed clearly that it had not been mistaken when it had declared: "I would like to reproduce the subjects borrowed from social reality... I would have liked to be the painter of humble and of disinherited."'") Presented in 1951, Beautiful-Air, Plate, Villages of Sinners... and little after the Prisoners revealed new aesthetic concerns. Remained faithful to itself, avoiding vulgarity and the effects melodramatic, there had tried to intensify its atmosphere and to be more directly realistic. The deformations remained but much more discrete. The color had grown rich and reinforced; to the gray and the blue of its beginnings, it had added the colours more the sharp of brown, yellow and red.

The composition had become clearer, the firmer and more moderate drawing. It pointed out Amiama by more than one aspect but kept something of blur and mysterious which left in us like the impression of a whisper in the night. Never more in the continuation, it will not be expressed with as much frankness, delicacy and tenderness. Dissatisfied, anxious, since 1950, it turns resolutely to the problèmesde structuring. It works its color, the exalte, purifies it all while holding it firmly dependent. Forgetting from now on the nonsignificant details, it paints its picture with great blows of brush, exploiting more and more the complementary ones and the effects of transparency. It wants, beyond appearances, to release the major significance of the topic treated through the permanence of the forms. Its meeting with the American painter Paul Keene marks a watershed in its career.

De Keene, it learns the techniques from casein; and, changing medium, qualities of its painting change. It looks further into the principles of the composition, discovers the logic of the lines, uses graphics to amplify the movement or to destroy it, show more aggressiveness or of resignation. The color warms up more to give to the unit a strongly decorative aspect. It gives up the air prospect gradually and, to suggest space, it is more strongly based on the graphics and discrete plays of shades and lights. The universe thus created lack of depth but is enough vast to make it possible to differentiate the objects. In 1953-1954, stock-broker of Guggenheim Foundation, it remains in New York, studies, visit the galleries, comes into direct contact with the large currents of the contemporary art. He exposes to the Side American Union in Washington and Saratoga Spring in the state of New York. The American criticism little accustomed to painting not-primitive haitienne is taken with deprived. "Joseph is not a primitive painter, written Mrs Judd Portner of Washington Pott and Times Herald. Although its works preserve the primarily Haitian characteristics - strong colors and a flat drawing - it is obvious that it was initiated with the principles of the pictorial technique and the composition.