In 1957, when François Duvalier came to power, he left Haiti for New York City and joined the Art Student's League until 1960, when his teacher, the painter Julian Levi, encouraged his artistic vocation.
During his stay in the United States, where he frequented museums, he was simultaneously intellectually nourished by abstract expressionism, then surrealism, as used and reinterpreted by American artists (De Kooning, Lam, etc.
Télémaque wanted to be reality-based and escape abstraction: even the title refers to his daily life, evoking the boats sirens he heard from his room in Brooklyn Heights.
From 1962 to 1964, he produced one of his most original series, in particular in the form of diptychs, where pieces of anatomy², accompanied by visual metaphors named "fictions"; (cross, arrow, weapon, underwear, urn, mask) and comments, sometimes simply written in chalk or pencil, flow on an initially white background (Le voyage, 1962 ; Portrait de famille, 1962, Fondation Gandur pour l'Art; Etude pour une carte du tendre, 1963;My Darling Clementine, 1963, MNAM, etc.).
Thus, in his paintings are found evocative everyday objects, notably of his lived experience in Haiti, and of multiple interpretations at the will of the spectator, complex reading images such as riddles to be deciphered (toothless head, Baron Samedi's white cane, sports shoes and equipment, camping furniture, and tents, etc.
Marked by the illness, then the death of his mother in 1993, and undoubtedly by the memory of the voodoo that was reigning in Haiti, he approached the theme of mourning in a darker way (bat, skull) and did his own magic in creating blends mixing coffee grounds with coloured pigments, to give them a sensual heaviness.
The 2000s saw a return to African sources, which the "negritude"; movement claims to be its own, and to a fresh look at French political events, possibly tinged with humour.
After several stays in Africa, Télémaque produced a series of acrylic paintings entitled "Trottoirs d'Afrique", presented in 2001 at the Louis Carré & Cie gallery (catalogue prefaced by Gérard Durozoi).
Fonds d'actualité n°1 (at the MNAM) is an indirect tribute to the satirical cartoonists Plantu and Pancho, with the figure of Jacques Chirac, then "elected as in Africa" with 82.21% of the votes.
On the occasion of the publication of a first monograph by Anne Tronche at Flammarion, in "La Création contemporaine"; collection, Louis Carré & Cie gallery presents on its stand at Fiac 2003 an exhibition bringing together a set of major works from the 1960s, entitled "Paris 1961".
In 2019, he created a surprise at the Rabouan Moussion gallery in Paris where, in the exhibition "L'inachevée conception", he presented an imposing canvas of ten meters long.
Produced in the calm of his workshop in Verneuil-sur-Avre in Normandy, the painting Al l'en Guinée (2016–18) evokes the fantasized journey of a long-distance walker.