Patrick Vilaire, Réflexion sur la mort .

Patrick Vilaire, a contemporary artist who works with iron (and therefore fire), lives and works in Haiti, a land that even today relies on the voodoo religion (worship of ancestors and the dead) to resist measures imposed by whites during the days of slavery. Patrick Vilaire takes obvious tactile pleasure in working with the material of iron, he does not indulge in easy seductiveness—the color is raw, the angles sharp and cutting. The chairs, tables, and sarcophagi that populate this exhibition are all instruments in the rites of death. But the true protagonist of the show is neither macabre nor morbid, for it is mankind itself.