Olivier Souffrant at Stems Gallery

Artist: Olivier Souffrant

Exhibition title: Cruel Summer

Venue: Stems Gallery, Paris, France

Date: October 17 – November 13, 2022

Photography: all images courtesy of the artist and Stems Gallery, Brussels/Paris

Every cosmogony begins with chaos. Not a destructive chaos but a fertile one, able to give birth to a completely new world. This is precisely the kind of chaos one might feel while looking at Olivier Jean-Daniel Souffrant’s works. Born from a mind constantly boiling with new ideas, an unshakable productive frenzy and a strong will to fill up the painting’s space until it nearly comes to implosion. Tangible chaos brought onto the canvas through the astute meeting of different techniques – painting, printing, collage –, of opposite feelings – brutality against tenderness, carelessness against utter despair –, as well as the unexpected meeting of icons crossing numerous eras and genres, from biblical art to contemporary pop culture. All of these criteria don’t make for an unprecedented world, one might say. But the abundance of shapes, disparate patterns and vivid colors on these large-shaped surfaces ultimately give rise to a singular system, where chaos paradoxically induces a new methodic way of organizing both the painting space and the narrative.

At first sight, one could easily compare the 28-year-old artist’s work to Jean- Michel Basquiat’s. Indeed, both are of Haitian descent and share an iconoclastic practice pervaded with the Caribbean country’s folklore, by street-art motifs, as well as certain violence and contained anger arising from Black people’s experiences in the United States. Although Souffrant’s gathering of multiple scenes on canvas overcome rationality, preventing us from calling his works “realistic” per se, they somehow still demonstrate how real they can be by instantly conveying our current world’s emotions and tensions. More specifically, the uprooting, resilience, and dedication of a teenage boy who had to leave Haiti for the United States following an earthquake that nearly cost him his life. Those of a young man who, once settled in Chicago, had to go through the troubles of living in the hood – a fate that many immigrants encounter when entering such a country filled with false hopes. Those of precarious art students who had to live in the streets for a while and learn to create with very limited means, quickly mastered Photoshop and printing techniques to produce at a low cost and let his creativity flow continuously through days and nights. From their subjects to their technique, Souffrant’s works reflect this burdening experience, as much as they highlight his relentlessness in reaching his goals.

Besides Basquiat’s obvious influence on his art, Picasso’s cubist paintings’ also could be echoed in their composite faces and bodies, while the way Souffrant deals with images and mass media is akin to Andy Warhol’s. Let’s be careful not to frame him into this legacy, though, without considering the decades separating the young artist from these late art history stars into account, even if he acknowledges their impact himself. Born in 1994, Souffrant is indeed part of the millennials and only three years apart from belonging to Gen Z – the latest generation, that was born with the Internet and continuous access to information and images.

From street walls to smartphone screens, exploring the ways art can be popularized is one of the young man’s greatest joys. Since his artistic debut, Souffrant holds on to his will of avoiding the contemporary art world intrinsic’s elitism by making his work as accessible as possible, while tackling both the “genius and almighty painter” cliché and outdated art practices’ hierarchies. Digital art’s common depreciation in the highest art spheres compared to painting’s sacredness has noticeably brought him to go against the flow and offer his own mixing of genres. For years, the artist has been expanding his own colossal image bank filled with magazine spreads, ad campaigns, screen captures, and other pictures he found on the internet. Printed and glued on the canvas amongst its painted parts (where Souffrant often applies hundreds of layers), these preexisting visual fragments then become inseparable from the overall pieces’ elements in front of our eyes, thus highlighting the necessity of their physical – and even haptic – experience.

Defining Souffrant’s works as “paintings” or “silkscreen prints” would then be misleading and reductive, as much as letting obsolete conditions to sanctified authorship dictate their value and singularity. Many elements in his pieces are indeed copied, duplicated, and borrowed: a woman’s back tattoo, a Chanel bag, a TV set, or a carpet… Here and there, we recognize Kim Kardashian or Mike Tyson’s faces on the cover of magazines, a Nike logo or a Hood By Air jacket, mixed with very famous icons from Western classical painting – mythological and Christian figures depicted in the Italian Renaissance way, knightly scenes reminiscent of medieval art’s, colors and patterns akin to Henri Matisse’s paintings and even women whose postures could remind us of Amedeo Modigliani’s odalisques. All these uncanny hybridizations tell us about how much time the Haitian artist spent looking at masterpieces with acute attention, digesting their most tiny details the same way he does with images he discovers daily while scrolling on Instagram.

As an artist, Olivier Jean-Daniel Souffrant does not wish to explicit his works, willingly leaving this responsibility to their viewers. He might share a few anecdotes that inspired them though, whether them being autobiographical or not: a night he spent in an expensive restaurant where clients and waiters treated him like an intruder; a stay with very wealthy White people whom he felt exploited by; or even the story of a slaves overseer laying down on the ground, exhausted by his tasks, while two Black horsemen ride to defend their peers. As cynical as it may be, this social commentary reaches finesse through the narrative and poetic synchronicity of the elements displayed on canvas. It does not really matter whether the scenes are happening before and after one another, or even if they truly happened at all.

What matters is how we can respond to the artist’s joyous profanation of symbols and his way of illustrating insidious games of power: the world’s most privileged people’s idleness facing the world’s most underprivileged people’s struggles, the first group’s indifferent bliss while the latter’s distress’ and rage keeps howling up to the point of rebellion. From mere brutality to ingenuous entertainment and even patronizing contempt, Souffrant’s works remind us, as Pierre Bourdieu would write it, that any individual reaction to a collective situation is first and foremost defined by one’s social status. first group’s indifferent bliss while the latter’s distress’ and rage keep howling up to the point of rebellion. From mere brutality to ingenuous entertainment and even patronizing contempt, Souffrant’s works remind us, as Pierre Bourdieu would write it, that any individual reaction to a collective situation is first and foremost defined by one’s social status.

While all the artist’s pieces are different from one another, windows appear there as recurring elements and beacons of hope. They embody the chance of escaping this jail of determinism while also displaying a “mise en abîme” of art itself. During the XVth century, Leon Battista Alberti did define painting as a window through which one could look at history, didn’t he? Opaque for some, and transparent for others, Souffrant’s own hybrid mythology is undisputedly open. To concur with his own explicit copies and pastiches of other’s works, the artist could almost tell us: “Help yourselves, everything is ready to be stolen here”. After all, by putting the viewers in front of such chaotic compositions, their author might as well help them catch the lights here and there that could make a new path towards freedom.

-Matthieu Jacquet

Olivier Souffrant, Cruel Summer, 2022, exhibition view, Stems Gallery, Paris

Olivier Souffrant, Lucien, 2022, Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas, 202.5 x 202.5 cm, 79 1⁄2 x 79 1⁄2 in.

Olivier Souffrant, Ecce Homo, 2022, Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas, 178 x 213 cm, 70 x 84 in.

Olivier Souffrant, Portrait d’une Marchande, 2022 Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas, 203.2 x 152.4 cm, 80 x 60 in.

Olivier Souffrant, Helen of Troy and Paris, 2022 Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas, 177.8 x 203.2 cm, 70 x 80 in.

Olivier Souffrant, Court, 2022, Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas, 228.6 x 177.8 cm, 90 x 70 in.

Olivier Souffrant, City of Angels, 2022, Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas, 152.4 x 203.2 cm, 60 x 80 in.

Olivier Souffrant, Lines (EBT BALENCI), 2022, Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas, 177.8 x 203.2 cm, 70 x 80 in.

Olivier Souffrant, Saint-Moritz, 2022, Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas canvas, 213.4 x 177.8 cm, 84 x 70 in.

Olivier Souffrant, New York, 2022, Acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas 152.4 x 228.6 cm, 60 x 90 in.