is a poet/writer, performer and painter who was born and raised in Haiti, sojourned in Chile, and currently lives in the United States. A self-taught artist, she was inspired by the paintings of Rufino Tamayo seen in Mexico, Marcelin started to paint in 1988. Newsday art critic Anne Landi stated the following about her: “By far the standout in the show is Michele Marcelin, who works in both hot and delicate colors and comes up with an entirely original vocabulary that’s both terrifying and irresistible…and explosion of neon colors that bears comparison to Kandinsky.”
The women Marcelin paints are alienated in their claustral spaces, framed by enclosures that confine and border their bodies within, conveying loneliness, melancholy and defiance. These nudes are textual. This is a public showing of a private world. These “framed” women, estranged figures accorded magical and spellbinding powers, marked by their nudity for public exhibition, tell stories that attach like memories to the viewer, revealing the subject as strange yet familiar.
