“The palm tree is both a witness and an ambassador of Martinique.”

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This phrase by Pierre Roy-Camille sets the tone for WHOSE PARADISE?. The palm tree, a recurring figure in the exhibition, is at once a familiar presence, a colonial memory, and a living archive. The show asks a central question: how was the idea of the “tropical paradise” invented and consumed by the West, and how does it differ from the lived realities of the Caribbean—shaped by history, social tensions, and environmental challenges?

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Each artist approaches this gap between imagination and reality in their own way.

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Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine turns away from bright postcard colors to paint labyrinth-like compositions in black and white. Created in 2024 in a climate of social unrest in Martinique, these works are filled with his recurring motif of Dragonflies of Loving Care. They are intimate spaces of resistance, where painting becomes both therapy and response to chaos. Flowers here are not ornamental, they are symbols of resilience and struggle.

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In contrast, Karine Taïlamé embraces color and material with bold intensity. In Jou Felicity (2025) and Magnificentia (2023), thick layers of paint almost take on a sculptural quality. Her vivid, sometimes fluorescent palette conveys the dense, humid atmosphere of the tropics: the heat, the trade winds, the organic vitality of Caribbean nature. Her flowers burst from the canvas like celebrations of life, inviting us into her intimate geography: a “tropical paradise” that is both real and imagined.

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Between these two extremes, Pierre Roy-Camille builds his work on fragments of memory and archives. In Memories of a Magician (2021), figures emerge from old travel journals and dreamlike visions. In his Blinded by the lights series (2024), grids of light both reveal and conceal—car headlights, fireflies, or shimmering illusions of the Caribbean night. His paintings invite us to reflect on history, memory, and the play between presence and absence.

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Dora Vital, working with oil pastels, explores a more intimate and quiet approach. Layer by layer, she lets light emerge from dense, velvety surfaces. In works like Nocturnal Garden (2023) and Caribbean Night (2025), she conjures a tropical nature that is secret, unexpected, and far removed from the blinding stereotypes of postcards.

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Closing the circle, Anabell Guerrero presents the photographic series The Land That Was Named (2023). Cliffs, trees, and the sea appear without embellishment: raw, powerful, untamed. Nature here is not decorative—it is sovereign, sometimes threatening, always irreducible to exotic imagery.

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Together, these contrasting visions collide and resonate: secret lights, nocturnal grids, bursting flowers, black-and-white labyrinths, indomitable cliffs. Each work contributes to dismantling the frozen image of the “tropical paradise.” And so the question remains: WHOSE PARADISE? Does it belong to the outsiders who consume it, or to those who live, imagine, and defend it every day?​

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Fanny Seimandi, Curator