THE REAL SURREAL PART I: NEW PAINTINGS BY SHNEIDER LÉON HILAIRE

APRIL 10 - MAY 17, 2025

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present the first of two back-to-back exhibitions demonstrating aspects of Contemporary art’s continued connections to ideas promulgated by Surrealist artists worldwide.  The first exhibition will focus on recent paintings by a contemporary artist living and working in Haiti, Shneider Léon Hilaire, and the second exhibition will posit certain aspects of Art Brut as the actual practice sought by the Surrealists in their explorations of psychic mediumship, automatic writing and drawing, dreams, psychotic breakdowns, magic and unexpected visual juxtapositionings of imagery.

It is our premise that Surrealism is alive and well in this universe and is often a natural proponent of culture itself. Given events worldwide, the viability of Art as a war cry of spiritual, intellectual and physical freedom is more relevant than ever.  These were always the goals of Surrealism.

Just being alive in Haiti puts one in the center of a red-hot flashpoint of survival. Hilaire is alive in Haiti, and he is in deep immersion as an artist in a place that has always been in a philosophical and creative relationship with Breton’s Surrealism.  In fact, a speech given in Haiti in the 40s to a group of students and intellectuals almost fomented an uprising.  

In her essay on Surrealism in the Caribbean (reprinted recently as the key essay in the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth titled Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1941) Suzanne Césaire said: 

“Our surrealism will then supply them the leaven from their very depths. It will be time finally to transcend the sordid contemporary antinomies: Whites-Blacks, Europeans-African, civilized-savages: the powerful magic of the mahoulis (spirits) will be recovered, drawn from the very wellsprings of life. Colonial idiocies will be purified by the welding arc’s blue flame.  The metal of our metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unique communions-all will be recovered. 

Surrealism, tightrope of our hope.” 

Indeed, in the Vodou world of Hilaire’s paintings, in the deliberate and careful restraint of their nighttime colors and implied animism there is always this hope that ceremony, knowledge and love will heal the heartbreak of a prosecuted culture exhausted yet vital despite earthquakes, storms and the lack of promised help from world powers.

These paintings are visual poems. They mine the history of the American religion; Vodou, to create an Afro-Futurist present, organic and sharp in form and content. We can live with their mysteries because they are not unanswered questions.  They are not solipsistic. The answers have been there before and after the Haitians were unwillingly pulled from Dahomey and Congo.

The Haitian contemporary artist owns his sources. He lives, not between two worlds, not in a syncretic world but in an expanded world lit by the dark orchid lights of the occult and the fecund forest wisdoms of Vodou.

Hilaire moves beyond the false artworld tropes of what a Haitian artist is or must be.  We are privileged to share his visions.  He mediates and translates for us.  He visually sings the drums.  We see the voices of the Lwa (spirits in the Haitian pantheon). He does what he wants to do in a direct and powerfully beautiful fashion.  This dance he does on a Surrealist stage demonstrates the poetic song of Leonard Cohen:

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in