Just being alive in Haiti puts one in the center of a red-hot flashpoint of survival. Hilaire is alive in Haiti, and he is in deep immersion as an artist in a place that has always been in a philosophical and creative relationship with Breton’s Surrealism. In fact, a speech given in Haiti in the 40s to a group of students and intellectuals almost fomented an uprising.

In her essay on Surrealism in the Caribbean (reprinted recently as the key essay in the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth titled Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1941) Suzanne Césaire said:
“Our surrealism will then supply them the leaven from their very depths. It will be time finally to transcend the sordid contemporary antinomies: Whites-Blacks, Europeans-African, civilized-savages: the powerful magic of the mahoulis (spirits) will be recovered, drawn from the very wellsprings of life. Colonial idiocies will be purified by the welding arc’s blue flame. The metal of our metal, our cutting edge of steel, our unique communions-all will be recovered.

Surrealism, tightrope of our hope.”

Indeed, in the Vodou world of Hilaire’s paintings, in the deliberate and careful restraint of their nighttime colors and implied animism there is always this hope that ceremony, knowledge and love will heal the heartbreak of a prosecuted culture exhausted yet vital despite earthquakes, storms and the lack of promised help from world powers.