Pascalita Prosper

3th of December 2023

The Kaviana is a haitian painting that depictss the haitian clandestine voyages that later changed to
the important migration of thousands of Haitians in the years 80-90 leaving the country for the
United States, fleeing poverty and the dictatorship of Duvalier government. I chose this artifact
because it’s an artistic work that describes a national phenomenon that began in 1972 and nowadays
continues to take on a worring and disturbing scale in the country and the worldwide. This situation
really struck me during my childhood. It was really terrible to watch because most of people didn't
reach their destination. It was a dream that turned on a nightmare because the sea was their final
resting place.
This Painting is painted by Favrange Valcin in 1972, a Haitian painter. It's made of canvas and oil
paint. It shows people on the sailboat sailing on the sea during a sunny day. The women wear
headscarfs and the men wear straw hats, they wear colorful Caribbean clothes. They look calm. The
painting is brightly colorful, multicolored with a majority of blue representing the sea and the sky.
The sails of the boats are not just white but multicolored, the boats are green, orange, red, blue,
yellow, brown and the images reflection of these objects in the sea water shows a play of color that
gives a multicolor aspect to the water like a prisme of color. This mix of colours makes you think of
a rainbow, a carnival or a happy celebration day. It is a positive feeling representing an achieving
dream for people full of faith and hope. But the reality was different. This depiction of sailing trips
is different from the various representations of the boat people painted later by different artists
which are dark in color and describe a tragedy of travel during a dark night or a storm.
This Painting belongs to Haitian realism artistic movement known as Haitian naive art, because it
depicts reality with an innocent vision of society. The rows and shapes, the curves and lines are
simple that make you think of children’s drawings representing the reality of the world through an
innocent vision of a child. This movement is the most widely used by young Haitian artists because
it represents the Haitian local art which normally describes daily scenes of the haitian life, habits
such as a market day, haitian village life such as women washing clothes at the river, men working
the land, children playing traditional games, hopscotch or skipping rope, making the rounds, etc.

Favrange Valcin is a Haitian painter born in 1947 in the town of Jérémie in Haiti and died in 2019 in
Port au Prince. In 1963, he began painting under the influence of his uncle Gerard Valcin who
introduced him to the art centre. He enriched his knowledge by taking distance art courses at the
Paris school of Art and attending art classes at Brooklyn museum. His painting style evolved from
banal realism to a social commitment to Haitian culture. He explored various pictorial movements
like realism, impressionism, cubism, constructivism. In a new painting derived from cubism, he
painted in 1997 the migration that became a worldwild phenomenon called La fuite vers nulle part
(Flight to Nowhere) where he used cubic shapes and dark colours to show the disruption of the
world, the end of the illusion. His vision is more mature, tougher, more critical and more
committed. His most famous painting is the Boat People painted in 1979 in an abstract style where
the mixture of the curves and dark colors are over-represented and reminescent of a nighmare.
I'm always interested in Haitian naive art. I love to admire the simple rows, shapes, lines and
curves, the play of colors and the representative everyday scenes that make me imagine and
appreciate the social lifestyle of the characters presented in the paintings like a child.