Issue 7, Profiles

Patrick Eugène

Portraying imagined figures from his diasporic community

Words CASSIE PACKARD

Photography NOLIS ANDERSON

Eschewing sitters or reference images, Haitian American artist Patrick Eugène paints portraits of people he’s never seen. A quintet of ladies in their Sunday best—a riot of church crowns, pearl earrings, and lace collars—with their arms loosely draped around one another, one lifting a cigarette to her lips with studied elegance. A couple, her red gown seeping into his cream suit, moving like a single body through a russet expanse accented with potted plants. A woman with an impossibly long neck—a creator, we are told—wearing a dress the color of swimming pools, nestled in a safflower armchair’s ample topography. These graceful, self-possessed subjects, all of whom are Black, exude a magnetic force. They may not exist in the flesh, but nonetheless elicit our investment in their interiority and curiosity about their stories, as if they were characters in a beautifully crafted novel whom we are prepared to follow to the very end.

“I want viewers to develop their own stories about these pieces,” Eugène tells me. “While my subjects aren’t people I know or have met, you could say we’re spiritually involved. Because they look related to one another and feel familiar to me, it’s almost as if I’m painting my relatives. I often have this experience of looking at the person who I’ve just painted and thinking, ‘You’re here! You made your way through the brush.’”

The closely watched artist, whose solo show Solitude opened at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery’s Paris location this February, came to painting later than most, at the age of 27. Born in New York to Haitian immigrant parents, Eugène grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island in a tight-knit community of Caribbean Americans, many of whom took pride in dressing impeccably and covered their walls with Caribbean art; these early aesthetic influences, he notes, inform his paintings today. During Occupy Wall Street, Eugène, then working as a financial planner, turned to drawing as a creative outlet. Encouraged by the positive feedback he received, he soon tried his hand at painting (first acrylic, then oil) and committed to an autodidact’s diet of museum visits, art books, and documentaries.

Eugène’s first Brooklyn solo show, held at BAF Gallery in 2016, featured spattered, mixed media abstractions that critiqued, and incorporated the material detritus of, gentrification in his East New York neighborhood, where slick new businesses were increasingly supplanting mom-and-pop shops. The pandemic lockdown prompted Eugène to relocate with his family to Atlanta, where he began to work in a figurative mode, branching out from (without ever really forsaking) the abstract paintings for which he was becoming known. “Abstraction set me free,” he says, recalling his initial surprise at finding he had worked 12 hours straight without eating. “I didn’t want to revisit figuration, which I worked with very early on, until I could feel that same kind of freedom with it.”

In the studio, Eugène doesn’t make preparatory sketches or elaborate underdrawings. Instead, he focuses on accessing a headspace conducive to creative work, typically putting on music (his youngest child is tellingly named Miles) and meditating or praying for guidance. “I want to accept ancestral energies and try to keep that channel open,” he says. “It’s part of why I paint.” His fluid and intuitive process, an art of broad strokes, begins with putting a ground on the canvas. After limning the figures and their environs, he tries not to spend too much time reworking or revisiting what he’s done. He avoids making changes to the subjects’ faces in particular.