Joseph Jean-Gilles continues the tradition of Haitian folk painting begun by artists such as Philomé Obin, Castera Bazile, Wilson Bigaud, and Rigaud Benoit. Yet unlike them, Jean-Gilles chose not to depict Haitian history or Voodoo ceremonies. His paintings have focused on idyllic, paradise-like visions, using still-lifes, landscapes and village life as his subjects. One can argue that the maintenance of this vision on the part of the artist is an act of memory and reclamation, since he has not lived permanently in Haiti since the 1970s. Haitian Landscape depicts through a series of clearly defined shapes, patterns, an intense palette, the fields, homes, trees, mountains, and figures of peasants that fill his compositions. As curator Gómez Sicre wrote during the artist’s first solo show, “Although Jean-Gilles adheres to many elements that characterize primitive painting–two-dimensional rendering, brilliant color, selection of his country’s people and landscape for subject matter, and a certain innocence of vision–he has reached a more advanced stage that is most evident in the luminosity that pervades his paintings and the astonishing precision with which the various elements are interwoven . . .” This is a world of order and beauty where the ravages of weather and harshness of poverty are not visible. Like France’s Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau in the nineteenth century, Jean-Gilles perpetuates in Haitian Landscape a natural world of harmony that probably no longer exists. The question remains: is the artist through the construction of this landscape rebelling against change or escaping via nostalgia? Joseph Jean-Gilles was born in Haiti. Although he attended the workshop at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, he is a self-taught painter. By the mid-1960s he was showing his paintings in group exhibitions outside his homeland, including the Penthouse Gallery of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965, the gallery at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. in 1966, and the Brooklyn Museum in 1969. In the late 1960s he moved to New York City and by 1985 he was living and working in South Florida, where he remains to this day. In 1971, he had his first solo exhibition at OAS headquarters, his first in the United States, at the invitation of curator José Gómez Sicre. Jean-Gilles’ favored subjects have been still-lifes, landscapes, and village scenes with crowds. Like fellow folk painter, Honduran José Antonio Velásquez, Jean-Gilles’ pictures are filled with an abundance of plants, animals, and humans, which are painted in great detail. His paintings are characterized by the intensity of his brilliant color and the smooth and even application of paint, which has been compared to the French nineteenth-century folk painter Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau. Until the 1980s his preferred medium was oil on canvas; by the middle of the decade he switched to acrylic paint.