Artist Spotlight | Alain Joséphine

Alain Joséphine (b. 1968) is a Martinican visual artist, Jazz musician and poet. His work has been showcased in a number of notable exhibitions and prestigious art fairs across the globe.

Currently living and working in Guadeloupe, he expresses his art through a range of mediums from works on paper to large-scale paintings. A constant unifier throughout his work is his insistence on capturing the poetry of his surroundings. The artist puts this down to his childhood in the largely untouched and sparsely populated commune of Riviere-Pilote in Martinique, where his imagination was captured by the rough wilderness and the green rolling hills which made up the areas natural terrain.

Now a professor of Visual Arts, his creativity and illustrative ideas continue to inspire those around him. Last year, his 2021 acrylic on canvas piece ‘Sans Titre 172’ showcased at Transatlantic Connections: Caribbean Narratives in Contemporary Art, a group exhibition presented on the occasion of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, at Christies. In early 2024 his work was also presented at Dulwich Picture Gallery’s ‘Soulscapes’, an exhibition of landscapes by artists from the African Diaspora. This year, his works on paper were presented at the European Art Fair (TEFAF) Maastricht, and his paintings at the Dallas Art Fair.

There is a wild beauty to his work, a density of lush scenery often in green and blue tones which emulate visions of earthliness and characterise his artistic oeuvre.

Active abstraction, defined Joséphine’s work further and distinguished it from that of his contemporaries. Whilst immediately picturesque and serene, his style penetrates the imagination much further

In Alain’s work, just as meter, rhyme and stanza distinguish and suffuse lines of poetry, so too the hills, topography and lay of the land impact our impression of his abstract paintings

The might and array of natures’ landscape is inextricable from the work of Alain Joséphine. His canvas works are instinctively instructive of the forces of the natural world.

Watch a recent interview with Alain Joséphine from his studios in Guadeloupe