Manes was born in Petit-Tou de Nippes in 1936 in Haiti. He was a self-taught artist from the workshop of Jaime Colson, a Dominican director of the Dramatic Art Society of Haiti. He started to paint under Gerard Resil, and Dieudonné Cédor, then under Luckner Lazard in 1961. He took up ceramics under Tiga and Emmanuel Joachim. He exhibited in Haiti and abroad. Collectors highly prize his scenes of Haitian life. Many of his works are children playing in the streets. In 1975, he discovered that he was allergic to all forms of paint, a tragedy for him as an artist. He was anguished by that, lonely and mad. Then one day in 1985, he decided to kill himself. " A sensitive and logical style in which depth is expressed by formal design alone," says the art critic and author Gérald Alexis in his book " Peintres Haitiens."