The Tatau or the original tattoo
The word tattoo comes from the Polynesian tatau, because it is here that the white man discovered it. The art of tattooing was indeed very developed in Tahiti and in the whole of Polynesia, where each victory saw the warriors' body blacken a little more, as much as an ornament as to impress the opponent. Men decorated their bodies almost entirely - a practice found to a lesser extent among women. Tattooing is linked to an initiation rite, which makes the new tattooed people pass to adulthood and lose their childhood tabu. The tabu or tapu, constitute a set of rules which structure Polynesian societies, they are linked to the sacred and the forbidden and define a certain number of practices and punishments. The tattooing technique was obviously very rudimentary in the beginning: small holes were pierced in the dermis where smoke black, an ink obtained from the kernel of the bancoul nut(Aleurites moluccana or tuitui in Tahitian), was then injected with a comb. Banned by the missionaries, tattooing remained clandestine until the early 1980s when it was rehabilitated as an art form in its own right. Today, the majority of Polynesians are tattooed, but not from head to toe. Contemporary tattooists borrow from traditional Polynesian motifs, made of spirals, mosaics and stylized figures evoking tiki, turtle, fish... Marquesan motifs are very popular. A large international convention dedicated to tatau takes place every year at the Tahiti and Islands Museum; it concludes with the Miss & Mister Tatau elections
A people of sculptors
Skilled with their hands, the Polynesians are a thousand-year-old people of artists. As the islands have neither ore nor industry, the Maohi obtain the tools and ornaments they need from the resources they have: rare species, coral, mother-of-pearl, coconut trees, etc. Sculpture is the major art in Polynesia, especially in the Marquesas Islands where it has reached a very high level of quality. In these remote islands, engraving is in the spotlight. Each stone encountered has an engraved motif. The materials are worked with chisel and hammer, or more commonly nowadays with a milling cutter whose tips are changed. The mastery of these tools, the techniques of polishing and polishing as well as the choice of materials represent an ancestral know-how. In order to ensure that this heritage continues, there are schools of sculpture in Polynesia as well as mother-of-pearl workshops, among which the Centre des Métiers d'art de la Polynésie française in Papeete is worth mentioning.To admire the objects that make up Polynesian material culture, go without hesitation to the Museum of Tahiti and the Islands
in the capital Papeete. The tiki is the most widespread work of art in Polynesia. This human representation of the divinity bears an indefinable expression on its face. Short on legs, elbows on his knees, his big head looks at you with round eyes. The largest tikis in French Polynesia are almost 2.50 m high and weigh several tons. But they are quite small compared to tikis from other regions, such as the moai from Rapa Nui, these statues from Easter Island, which are 10 m high and weigh almost 80 tons! Each tiki is endowed with a magical power, the mana, a supernatural force brought by an arioi, the priest of the Maohis rites. Tikis can be found everywhere, in the middle of the jungle or in the middle of an avenue, as a pendant or a doorknob. The most impressive are those carved in stone, in keetu or basalt, which we meet at random during a walk in the forest, and which seem to protect the place. The ones that can be bought, carved in coconut, tou (dark and veined wood) or miro (rosewood) are sometimes 1 m long and are made with exemplary precision and regularity. The smaller ones are carved in mother-of-pearl or sometimes in aito, a very hard wood.A paint imported from France
French Polynesia, its shimmering colors and scenes of daily life have been a great source of inspiration for several renowned painters. The most famous is of course Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Often alone and plagued by poverty, he lived in Tahiti from 1891 to 1893, then from 1895 to 1901. It was during this period that he produced his most beautiful works, which remained unnoticed until his death. Despised by his contemporaries, whom he himself despised, the painter only received posthumous recognition. Gauguin was one of the first Europeans to capture and express the quintessence of Maohi civilization, its hedonism and generosity. Like Jacques Brel, he chose Hiva Oa, in the Marquesas, to end his days. However, his legacy remains complex for Polynesia, especially for the sulphurous reputation he made there and the problems his notorious pedophilia caused: a social trauma that was never really recognized by the metropolitan authorities. Some of his most beautiful works are Poèmes barbares (1896), Femmes de Tahiti (1891) and Manao Tupapau (1892)
Without question, Paul Gauguin had a strong influence on the paintings of Henri Matisse (1869-1954). The latter, trained in the painting workshop of Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), was initially influenced by pointillism before gradually moving away from realistic colors. Inspired by his many travels during which he developed his passion for warm colors and opulent bodies, this great lover of light left for Tahiti in 1930 and said: "I will go to the islands, to look under the tropics, the night and the light of dawn that have no doubt another density. The light of the Pacific is a deep golden cup in which one looks. I remember that when I arrived, it was disappointing and then little by little, it was beautiful, it was beautiful, it was beautiful!" Matisse only stayed two and a half months in Tahiti and the Tuamotus (Fakarava and Apataki), and painted only one canvas there, but this stay will mark all his future works. Finally, let us mention Jacques Boullaire (1893-1976), who arrived in Polynesia in 1937, a great lover of the raw light of the islands, and who produced numerous engravings and paintings there: portraits of children and wahines or other tropical landscapes.
A contemporary art still little represented
The contemporary scene in Tahiti is struggling to emerge. First of all, it must be said that subjects such as the techniques of the many painters on the island are inherited from the masters who have passed through and are struggling to form a true cultural identity in the face of a very well-developed craft and traditional arts. The few galleries dedicated to contemporary art are rare and are mainly located in Papeete and Raiatea
French Polynesia has nevertheless seen the emergence of important figures in contemporary art from Oceania. Thus Bobby Holcomb (1947-1991) distinguished himself by the transdisciplinarity of his practice: he excelled in dance, music, painting and singing. During his eventful life he frequented personalities such as Frank Zappa and Salvador Dali. He arrived in Tahiti in 1976 and settled in the village of Maeva in Huahine. Holcomb became an ardent defender of Polynesian culture, notably within the Pupu Arioi troupe, inspired by the social protest movements of the late 1960s, which distinguished itself by its songs committed to respect for the environment as well as by its naive-looking paintings. To protest against the metropolitan nuclear tests in the archipelagos, Bobby Holcomb refused French nationality all his life. Gotz (1964) is one of the local figures not to be missed. A painter, he is also a sculptor, a creator of accessories for theatre and music, a comic book illustrator and a fervent enthusiast of tattoos, on which he has written several books. He arrived in Moorea in 1991 and set up his studio there. His work is imbued with a certain spirituality, he himself says that "behind the set, he reveals impermanence".
From the new metropolitan Eden to the emergence of a Polynesian photographic scene
Photography in Tahiti, as in all the Polynesian archipelagos, has developed as a means of constructing the image of a new paradise. Thus, environmental qualities and indigenous Maohi populations are used for ideological purposes: the French colonial empire possesses small jewels, new Edens preserved from its development and which it can now appropriate. Among the photographers whose work was constitutive of the collective colonial imagination, Paul-Émile Miot (1827-1900), a French naval officer from the West Indies, distinguished himself by his work on Polynesia. He arrived in Papeete in 1869 and then in the Marquesas Islands in 1870, following a great expedition that he led across the entire Pacific Ocean, passing through Chile and Easter Island. In Polynesia, he produced a series of photographs, Oceania, which was used in particular to illustrate Le Tour du monde, a new travel journal, an illustrated French weekly published from 1860 onwards. It includes some 57 pictures, portraits of upper-class Tahitian women and natives, views of the islands, their lagoons and endemic vegetation. It thus feeds a certain colonial practice of ethnography and actively participates in giving Tahiti the image of a paradise in the antipodes. We also find in him the figure of the fortuitous ethnographer, like the Spanish sailors who took the first photographs among the Amerindian tribes in the 19th century. At the time, photography was an amateur activity, a hobby for travellers, which nevertheless served to build a certain colonial identity, to give their image to empires and their conquered peoples. In 1989, the Musée d'Orsay devoted an exhibition to him entitled Paul-Émile Miot, photographer of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands
Charles Burton Hoare (19th century) and his wife Sophia (19th century), both from Manchester, occupied a prominent place in the photographic scene of Tahiti at the end of the 19th century. When they settled on the island in the late 1860s, they founded a photographic studio. The Hoare were the official photographers of the protectorate, and they produced portraits of people in power, particularly those of the royal family. Charles died quickly and Sophia took over the family business, which she continued to run for almost thirty years. Little by little she gained a reputation that she still has today, and was awarded a bronze medal at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. She produces many portraits on albumen paper of the Tahitian youth; they are of great quality.
There is little information today about photography in Polynesia during the 20th century, and the medium has only taken a truly artistic turn in recent decades. Thus, the Hoho'a Nui festival, created by the F16 association in 2010, brings a new look at photography in Polynesia. It allows local artists, both professionals and amateurs, to exhibit at the Maison de la culture de la Polynésie française in Papeete and the public to discover local talents, such as the young Tahiri Sommer (1994), who stands out for his dreamlike and digital world, or Jalil Sekkaki (1968), a surf photographer who also illustrates himself through dynamic and colourful scenes of local folklore.
The recent importation of street art
The development of street art is very recent in Tahiti. We can even say that it is the creation of the Ono'u (join the colors) festival in 2014 by a young local company that allowed frescoes to see the light of day in Papeete as in the Polynesian islands (in Bora-Bora, Moorea and Raiatea for example). For the past six years, graffiti has been experiencing a real explosion locally. One of the most appreciated works created for the 2015 edition of the festival is La Tahitienne Rouge, the result of a collaboration between Seth, a globe painter from Paris, and HTJ, a Tahitian graphic artist who is himself a street-artist and who has created renowned works from Papeete to Raiatea. A young sleeping woman, wrapped in a red sarong with white patterns, lies on a background of the same colors. The artists refer to the traditional pareos representing white hibiscus on a red background. Behind the apparent serenity that emerges from the fresco, the motif hides a political message: a mushroom cloud and the symbol of radioactivity, lost among the traditional forms, refer to the nuclear tests conducted by France off the archipelago. HTJ himself illustrated himself on the building of the Political Party of Polynesia with a large fresco representing a tiki, entitled La Mana Te Nunaa, or "power to the people".
Another remarkable painting was done by Irish artist FinDac during the fourth edition of the festival in 2017. It is a portrait of a modern-day vahine, Herehia, which adorns a blind wall on Rue du Docteur Cassiau in Papeete. She is wearing a mother-of-pearl crown and carries a Tahitian bird in each hand. Her body is painted entirely in white, while around her eyes a make-up in the shape of a blue superhero mask runs down her cheeks, as if she were crying. Herehia is part of a series of portraits made by the artist around the world, in which he represents women as anonymous superheroines
Finally, a beautiful mural by Australian Fintan Magee more recently appeared in Papeete. During the 2019 edition of the festival, he takes over the wall of the Paofai clinic in Papeete to create an embrace scene with touching melancholy of a Polynesian couple: Force of Memory. The man is prostrate, wearing a warrior's tattoo on his left arm, while a woman takes him in her arms and puts her head on his back. The whole thing is done in a disturbing photo-realistic style, but the scene seems fleeting, like a memory captured just before it fades away. Some of the bodies fade into the background, as if they were disappearing. The website tahitiheritage.pf references many works, with maps of their location, useful for any enthusiast wishing to venture into the streets of Papeete or Raiatea.
