35 paintings from Jonathan Demme’s vast collection of Haitian art on display at NYC center

Jonathan Demme’s Haitian art on display in NYC

NEW YORK — A man in a straw hat clutching a knife creeps toward the figure of a large woman asleep under the stars. Bare-breasted women dance at a voodoo-infused Christmas ceremony. Villagers crowd around the corpse of a fisherman washed ashore after a storm.

These vivid scenes are on display at New York’s French Institute Alliance Francaise (FIAF), part of a small show of Haitian paintings borrowed from the vast collection of acclaimed film director Jonathan Demme.

Together the 35 artworks by 14 largely self-taught artists evoke the everyday lives of Haiti’s farmers, fishermen and lumberjacks, the rugged beauty of the lush, mountainous island and the complex religious beliefs of a people who trace their ancestry back to African slaves, French colonists and the indigenous Taino.

Demme, the Oscar-winning director of “The Silence of the Lambs,” has been obsessed with Haiti since the mid-1980s, filming several documentaries about the impoverished, violence-wracked nation.

The last time works from Demme’s collection were shown in Manhattan was in 1997, when more than 100 paintings were exhibited at the Equitable Gallery, accompanied by the catalog “Island on Fire: Passionate Visions of Haiti from the Collection of Jonathan Demme.”

The paintings in FIAF’s smaller show are noteworthy for their flattened perspective, a hallmark of so-called naive art. Some are rendered in a brilliant palette of neon pinks and jungle greens, others in muddy tones of gray, rust and brown.

But naive is surely a misnomer for a work as complex as Wilson Bigaud’s “The Artist Contemplates Death in the Midst of Life.”

That vividly wrought scene depicts two ambulance drivers bearing a stretcher to collect the body of a fisherman whose boat has taken on water and washed ashore. The wind whipping through the palm fronds suggest that a hurricane has just passed through, leaving stormy seas and dead fish in its wake. The ambulance has left a visible track in the wet sand, and a clutch of villagers, including a policeman and a woman dressed in her Sunday finest, stand by watching.

The painting speaks of tropical tragedy, but a tragedy leavened with unexpected humor — the policeman’s tiny white horse, the woman’s elegant, broad-brimmed hat. It’s the kind of story telling that might appeal to a master storyteller-with-a-heart like Demme, whose work over the years has ranged from commercial hits like “Married to the Mob” to the art films “Stop Making Sense” and “Swimming to Cambodia” to last year’s “Rachel Getting Married” about addiction and recovery.

Demme, 65, first became interested in Haitian art when he lived around the corner from a Haitian art gallery on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the ’80s. He has been collecting and studying it ever since, finding its composition and color, its themes and emotions, its spirituality and mysticism, a continuing source of inspiration for his own work.

“My love for Haiti now constitutes such a big part of who I am as a person, that were all this Haitiana somehow suddenly removed from my inner databank, I literally can’t imagine who I would be today,” he said.

The art show is part of FIAF’s monthlong “World Nomads” festival of Haiti’s music, literature, cinema and visual arts. The exhibit, which is free to the public, opens Thursday and remains on view until June 13.

On The Net:

www.fiaf.org/