Fig 1. Set photo Every Picture Tells a Story (1978). Photo: Carlos Tramm
Felix de Rooy is well aware of this context and these connections, and it is no coincidence that he used the term creolité in the above quote. What he writes, for instance, resonates with Edouard Glissant’s concepts of “errantry” and “creative marronage,” and also with Glissant’s definition of Creolité as a method and a process, rather than as a product and fixed state. His dramatic, provocative language also brings to mind the convulsive political surrealism of Glissant’s compatriot Aimé Césaire, to cite another obvious example.[3] Examining how such ideas have been articulated, shared and translated across the historical, linguistic and cultural boundaries that intersect the Global Caribbean is, as such, a long overdue project of a magnitude far beyond this short essay; but it would certainly offer a rewarding way to situate Felix de Rooy, intellectually and critically.
My aim in this brief and rather informal reflection is, instead, on situating Felix de Rooy’s work in relation to that of some of his artistic “fellow travellers” in the Global Caribbean. In doing so, I will focus on Jamaica, as that is the area I know best, but obviously other Caribbean connections could also be explored. I am particularly interested in those direct and indirect artistic interactions that took place in the Caribbean in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s and laid the groundwork for the artistic and critical debates that now prevail in the global contemporary art world, of which artists such as De Rooy are important and still insufficiently recognized pioneers.
I do not recall when exactly I became aware of Felix de Rooy’s work, but it would have been some time in the mid to late 1980s, when I was a junior staff member at the National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ).[4] The catalogue of The Print: Four Graphic Techniques, a 1977 exhibition at the NGJ, may have been my earliest encounter. De Rooy was represented by only a lithograph and an etching, but The Print is of interest here because it provides some insights into those, largely forgotten networks and directions in Caribbean art that helped to shape his early artistic trajectory.
One of De Rooy’s works in The Print—the lithograph Familiar Crucifixion (1973), reproduced in the exhibition catalogue—was owned by Hugh Dunphy (1934-2019), an English-born art, antiques and book seller and collector. Dunphy at that time divided his life between Jamaica, where he operated the Bolivar art gallery and bookstore, and Curaçao, where he owned and restored the Landhuis Siberie (Dunphy’s second wife was from Curaçao) and held part of his Caribbean art collection. Bolivar served as an active conduit for several Caribbean exchanges at that time, particularly between Jamaica and Curaçao, and had in 1975 hosted Psycho-Realism, a traveling group exhibition of work by Antillean artists in which De Rooy—who was based in Curaçao at that time—was also represented.[5] These informal, artist- and collector- driven interactions presented a notably different picture from what was offered in official exchanges such as the roving CARIFESTA festival, which was invested in a more narrow and dogmatic conception of Caribbean art and aligned to the governmental politics of that time.[6]
The Print, which was curated by the NGJ’s recently appointed Director/Curator David Boxer (1945-2017), was on the surface a didactic exhibition, designed to expose the Jamaican public to what were then the four main categories of fine art printmaking techniques; but it appears that there was more to it.[7] For one, it was an international exhibition, which featured work by artists from Jamaica as well as from elsewhere in the Caribbean and Europe and North America.[8] At a time when the NGJ’s official mandate was nationally focused and expressly nationalist, the international scope of The Print suggests a desire to open up the conversation beyond the orthodoxies of the nationalist school and to explore other significant relationships, within and beyond the Caribbean.
There was also a notable consistency in the subject matter and style of the selected prints, most of which shared an expressionist focus on the human body. This too reflected a development in Caribbean art that moved away from the production of affirmative national icons that had dominated the Caribbean art world in the early to mid-20th century, and instead delved into the psychological and existential questions facing the modern individual. While concerned with the subjective, this newer, figurative type of work was also deeply political, not only in terms of its defiant cultural politics but in how it responded to the local and global existential challenges of its time, such as the Cold War and the end of colonialism. David Boxer’s lithograph Kindertotenlied (1976), which was also included in The Print, for instance alluded to the mounting socio-political tensions in Jamaica, and its innocent victims; yet the flayed, skeletal child in the centre of the composition also echoes the 1972 Vietnam War photo by Nick Ut of the naked girl Phan Thi Kim Phuc, who had been severely burnt by napalm.
Boxer coined the term “New Imagist” to describe this new direction in Caribbean art, of which he was himself a representative and which he associated with related developments in European, North American and Latin-American Art since the mid-20th century.[9] Paper and graphic media were prominently used by the representatives of these developments, as this offered a pared down but powerfully evocative visual language that suited the New Imagists’ psychological explorations, which helps to explain why such work dominated the selections in The Print.
Felix de Rooy’s early work was closely aligned with these developments, which was obviously the reason why he was included in The Print. The term “Psycho-Realism,” which was the title of the previously mentioned group exhibition —and which De Rooy has also used to describe his own work— confirms this close kinship. Its characteristics are on clear display in Familiar Crucifixion, which is closely related in form and content to works such as Carry On (1972) and The Magic Touch (1972) in the current retrospective.
Fig 2. Felix de Rooy, Carry On (1972). Courtesy of the artist
Fig 3. Felix de Rooy, The Magic Touch (1972). Courtesy of the artist
It represents a Christ-like crucified upper body figure, with an image of a mother and child, or Madonna and child, integrated into the overall form. The forms are sinuous, to the point of seeming liquid, and the ambiguously gendered and sexualized bodies seem to merge, separate, and shift in shape before our eyes. The figures are simultaneously ethereal and transparent, visceral and burdened with the heaviness of being, and the imagery suggests multiple, contradictory and uncertain readings —a deliberate opacity which contrasts strongly with the emphatic propagandist legibility of much of the earlier, nationalist Caribbean art.
The work that De Rooy produced at that time may seem far removed from what he produced later on, especially in terms of the media used. I however believe that it was this liberating artistic moment that allowed him, and other Caribbean artists of his generation, to “escape the prison of genetic and historical identity” and to embrace the sort of “creative marronage” Glissant had in mind, and that it was there that the foundation for later developments in contemporary Caribbean art was laid.[10] Closer scrutiny reveals that there are, in fact, many persistent preoccupations in his work: the performative, inherently autobiographic focus on the body; the provocative erotic overtones; the allusions to religious and spiritual iconographies; and the resistance to singular interpretations. The conceptual and thematic continuities in De Rooy’s work are indeed far more significant than the more obvious aesthetic and technical transformations.
We also get clues about Felix de Rooy’s Caribbean artistic networks from his personal art collection, of which several key examples are included in the present retrospective. Artists from Suriname and the Dutch Antilles are well represented, and reflect De Rooy’s family history; as well, undoubtedly, his commitment to supporting those artists who, like him, were relegated to the neo-colonial margins of the Dutch art world. My curiosity was however piqued by an undated painting by the Australian-Jamaican artist Colin Garland (1935-2007), which was presumably acquired during the same period of exchange with Jamaica, when Garland was regularly presented at Bolivar. The painting, which represents a beautiful, long-haired black female figure in profile, is titled Ezulie, for the Haitian Vodou lwa (or divinity) of beauty, love, sexuality, and womanhood, and the Black Madonna. The painting’s exquisite stylization and patterned design against a gold background, brings to mind the splendorous iconography and aesthetic of the drapos, the sequined and embroidered Vodou flags.
Fig 4. Colin Garland, Ezulie (undated). Courtesy of Felix de Rooy
Colin Garland was as openly queer as the Jamaica of his time permitted, and his work is full of allusions to the politics of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean without being literal or specific, which was a strategy other queer artists in the Caribbean, such as David Boxer, also used. The seductive visual elegance of Garland’s paintings belies much of its carefully coded content, which also extended to the broader social and political issues that haunted the Caribbean during his lifetime. His epic triptych In the Beautiful Caribbean (1974) in the collection of the NGJ is, for instance, far more than a tribute to the fragile natural beauty and cultural richness of the Caribbean; it presents a grand, and ultimately quite critical panorama of the troubled, neo-colonial dynamics of Caribbean life during the Cold War.
Garland was a regular visitor to Haiti, where he had friends such as the Haitian painter Bernard Sejourné, at a time when that country offered a more liberal and welcoming environment to queer visitors. It is interesting that De Rooy acquired a painting that represents Ezulie, as her veneration in Vodou has traditionally provided a safe space for queer men and women. The painting may also manifest the symbolic life of his Haitian grandmother.
The Caribbean may be notoriously conservative and sometimes violently homophobic, but small, culturally vibrant pockets of queer freedom have long existed in elite and popular cultures alike, and certainly in the art world. I would imagine that the young Felix de Rooy also found freedom, common cause, and artistic inspiration in those safe spaces, before moving to the more broadly liberal and inclusive environment of Amsterdam (at least when it comes to gender and sexuality).
As a curator, I am particularly interested in the intersections between Felix de Rooy’s work as an artist, curator, and collector. These intersections appear to be part of a broader creative and critical continuum rather than separate elements of his practice, and this is obviously key to understanding his work. Colin Garland was —perhaps not coincidentally— also an artist–collector whose home and studio, initially in the hills above Kingston and later on Jamaica’s North Coast, was like a modern-day cabinet of curiosities and at times also brought to mind the altar-assemblages of Vodou. And David Boxer too was an artist, curator, and collector, who blurred the boundaries between these roles in his life and work; especially in his highly staged home environment and his extravagant, expansive installations, which included many collected objects and images.
While such creative interconnections between curating and collecting are of course not unique to the Caribbean cultural sphere, they take on poignant significance in its context. The Caribbean was, after all, one of the first world areas to be collected, curated and ethnographically represented in the context of the colonial project: Hans Sloane’s collecting activities in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and his cabinet of curiosities, for instance, served as the foundation of the British Museum.[11] Modern artist–collector–curator practices in the Global Caribbean, such as those of De Rooy, Boxer, and perhaps also Garland, can therefore also be regarded as a strategy to interrogate, subvert, and challenge those colonial modes of collecting and representation.
One of my early encounters with the work of Felix de Rooy was, in fact, through his work as a collector and curator, namely the 1989–1990 Wit over Zwart (White on Black) exhibition at the Tropenmuseum, which featured the collection of “black interest” objects and images he and Norman de Palm had acquired.
Fig 5. Exhibition photograph from the Wit over Zwart (1989), Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo: Pierre Verhoeff
The racialised and racist images and objects this exhibition documented and critiqued helped to fuel the passionate discussions about race and representation that were emerging throughout the Global Caribbean at that time; further representing another important, generative moment in the development of Caribbean contemporary art in which De Rooy has played an important pioneering role.
The debate was actively present in my own professional networks, with Boxer as one important interlocutor. The Courtauld Institute doctoral dissertation of Petrine Archer-Straw, who had been a colleague at the NGJ in the mid–1980s, explored similar subject matter and eventually became the book Negrophilia: Avant-garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (2000). I also became aware of related work by other UK-based artists and cultural of Caribbean descent such as Keith Piper, Sonia Boyce, and Eddie Chambers (who is also an artist, curator and collector of “black interest” objects) and, a bit later on, of the photographic work of the American-Jamaican artist Renée Cox. My exposure to the critical discussions, publications, collections, and art works on race and representation, was a sobering eye-opener to me as a white European, as they featured images, objects and popular traditions (such as Zwarte Piet) I had grown up with as a child in Belgium but had admittedly not questioned until after I moved to Jamaica.
I am consequently very interested in Felix de Rooy’s assemblages, which typically combine collected and fabricated objects, and are sometimes collaborations with other artists, as that seems to be where his various pursuits most productively and provocatively coalesce. It is the reason why I was drawn to Cry Suriname, from which I used a 1992 version as an illustration in my Caribbean Art (1998, 2022) book.[12] I was attracted to the assemblage’s eloquent, gestural simplicity, namely the manner in which it so powerfully evoked a complex set of histories —Suriname’s colonial past, its murderous civil war and dictatorship, and the social challenges faced by its migrants in the Netherlands— by merely combining four resonant objects, arranged not coincidentally in a manner which again suggests a crucifix: a racist sculpture of a screaming black head, a book on Suriname, a human bone, and a portable stove.
Works such as Cry Suriname capitalize on the evocative power of the formally displayed object, on what the American literary historian Stephen Greenblatt has called “resonance.” Greenblatt defined “resonance” as: “the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic, cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which it may be taken by a viewer to stand.”[13] What Felix de Rooy’s assemblages further illustrate is that such resonance can be manipulated strategically, in ways that alter and challenge the object’s original meanings, turning them into a powerful tool of critique. Such strategies are fairly common in contemporary art from the Global Caribbean today, but were pioneered by artists such as De Rooy.
Although De Rooy lived and exhibited in the Caribbean for part of his life, his work is not very well known in the region today, and certainly not outside of the Dutch language group. The present retrospective an important step towards recognizing his artistic and art historical importance, and it is rewarding that a major European museum such as the Stedelijk Museum which has its own colonial history, is taking the lead in this. It is however also important to view his work in dialogue with the broader picture of contemporary art from the Global Caribbean. I can only hope that this exhibition will be the start of that dialogue, and that this will include reintroducing Felix de Rooy’s work to the Caribbean itself, as it is one of the ironic side effects of the Global Caribbean discourse that the Caribbean itself has been side-lined, in part because of its lack of institutional power.
About the Author
Veerle Poupeye is a Belgium-born, Jamaica-based art historian, curator and critic specialized in art from the Caribbean, and the former Executive Director of the National Gallery of Jamaica. The second, revised and expanded edition of her foundational Caribbean Art, originally published in 1998, was published in 2022 in the World of Art series of Thames and Hudson.
[1] “Introduction” in Ego Documenta: The Testament of My Ego in the Museum of my Mind. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2018, p. 7.
[2] The term “Global Caribbean” was first used by political scientists such as Robert Buddan to describe the globalized, borderless Caribbean politico-economic sphere. It was in 2009 applied to art by the Haitian-American artist and curator Edouard Duval-Carrie in his like-named exhibition series at the Little Haiti Cultural Center in Miami. The term is now commonly used to describe the globalized sphere of contemporary Caribbean art.
[3] See: Edouard Glissant. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989 (originally published in French in 1981), and Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 (originally published in French in 1990); and: Aimé Césaire. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001 (originally published in French in 1939)
[4] I moved to Jamaica in September 1984 and started as a semi-voluntary, part-time docent and curatorial assistant in the NGJ’s Education Department later that year. I became Assistant Curator in 1987.
[5] Another conduit for such unofficial Caribbean exchanges was the Olympia International Art Centre, also in Kingston, an initiative of the Jamaican art patron and collector A.D. Scott, who exhibited and collected Erwin de Vries from Suriname and Aubrey Williams from Guyana. Williams and de Vries were regular visitors to Jamaica and worked closely with Jamaican artists such as Barrington Watson and Eugene Hyde.
[6] CARIFESTA is a Caribbean-wide arts festival associated with the CARICOM union of Caribbean states. The first CARIFESTA was held in Guyana in 1972.
[7] The National Gallery of Jamaica was established in 1974. David Boxer joined the staff as Director/Curator in 1975 and later became Chief Curator, a position he held until 2013.
[8] The NGJ did not have the funding to borrow internationally for its own exhibitions, but the international scope of this exhibition was achieved by borrowing prints from local collections, including Boxer’s own, rapidly growing collection, which accounted for most of the examples from outside of the Caribbean. The only exception was a lithograph by Karel Appel which was owned by Thelma de Rooy.
[9] The term was adopted from the title of the New Images of Man exhibition at MoMA in 1959. Several of the artists Boxer subsequently included in The Print, such as Karel Appel, Leonard Baskin, and Willem de Kooning, had been featured in that exhibition.
[10] See fn 1 & 3.
[11] Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was an Irish physician, naturalist and collector, who travelled to the Caribbean in 1687 to serve as the personal physician of the colonial Governor of Jamaica, the 2nd Duke of Albermarle. His account of his travel and collecting activities was published under the title A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica was published in two volumes, in 1707 and 1725, respectively.
[12] The first edition was published in the World of Art series of Thames & Hudson in 1998; the second, revised and expanded edition in 2022, in the same series.
[13] Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, p. 42.
