How to read a painting that, in 1965, departs from both American and French ‘academic art’ (his words), mixing figurative elements that are immediately visible but difficult to decipher: characters from cartoons, a dried flower from the past, a birth certificate, a self-portrait in a dark tunnel, a bag of charcoal about to be eaten by a green mouth?
Is it because he was so hard to classify that the public is only now presented with a retrospective of Hervé Télémaque?