Olivier Souffrant

Olivier Jean-Daniel Souffrant (b. 1994, Port-au-Prince, HT) lives and works in Chicago, ILL.

Throughout his work, Souffrant is referencing African American masters such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Jean-Michel Basquiat and also European painters like Botticelli, Van Gogh, and Picasso. He witnesses the coup d’état of 2004 and later the earthquake of 2010. Therefore, with his Haitian background and his lack of resources, Souffrant uses everyday materials such as magazines, online publications, computers, and mobile phone to create his paintings.

Souffrant applies digital ways to render the collage technique by using photoshop where repeatedly he cuts and pastes images, by scanning images from magazines or using free-source images from the internet, he creates a new and fresh image translated into a 2-dimensional object. These images are printed either on canvas or on aluminum panels, treated as an underpainting where the artists repaint them with acrylic and oil paint. With these techniques, Souffrant is bringing up ideas such as the over-saturation of our society with instant images and their appropriation use. His work explores the depths of emotional and physical interiors through the layering of paint and images culled from social media.

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Olivier Jean-Daniel Souffrant studied at the University of Illinois, Chicago, IL. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions with Stems Gallery, Paris, FR; Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, NY and Room57 Gallery, New York, NY. He has shown with institutions such as The Carr Center, Detroit, MI and the Harvey Museum, Talladega, AL.

Olivier Souffrant will have a forthcoming solo exhibition with Stems Gallery, April 2023, Brussels, BE.