Charlier Vladimir Cybil

Charlier Vladimir Cybil’s No Chaser, 2023 is part of the artist’s Indigo Suites, a series sparked by the discovery that her studio once housed an old indigo mill. The work merges layers of history and symbolism through mixed media on canvas, linen, and denim, bringing together Caribbean vernacular imagery with American visual idioms. A vivid bunch of bananas sits alongside anatomical sketches, textile motifs, and Afro-diasporic symbols, creating a composition that is both playful and charged with cultural memory.

The series interrogates archetypes that exist at the intersection of Afro-diasporic spirituality and popular American culture. Denim, cowboy boots, and bandana paisley motifs—signifiers of Americana—become entangled with references to Vodou deities such as Zaka, guardian of agriculture, or with ritual offerings like bananas, rendered here in their raw, non-commercial form. This layering resists fixed attribution: the same image can evoke Haitian ritual, Indigenous practices of the Americas, or the iconography of the U.S. cowboy. By staging this ambiguity, Cybil dismantles cultural hierarchies and insists on the intertwined genealogies that shape the Americas.

Through No Chaser and the broader Indigo Suites, Cybil proposes a “new Americana” grounded in postcolonial rethinking. By adopting the formal language of American painting yet embedding it with Caribbean vernacular codes, the artist creates a space of negotiation where sacred and popular, African and Indigenous, Caribbean and North American traditions coexist. The bananas in the composition become more than fruit: they are both offering and marker, emblematic of a diasporic landscape in which symbols migrate, overlap, and acquire new power.