Chicago-based visual artist Olivier Souffrant bridges the digital and physical worlds through layered canvas collage and figurative painting. His process mirrors music production: he digitally samples hundreds of image fragments, including masterworks, to synthesize a completely original composition in Photoshop. Each piece consists of hundreds of digital layers, where fragments of diverse images combine to create a final work that is completely original. Once printed on canvas, Souffrant reworks the piece by hand using acrylic, oil pastel, spray paint, and physically layered canvas to create striking three-dimensional depth. His theatrical, narrative scenes arrange figures and architectural elements into staged tableaux that feel both familiar and surreal. By continuously building up and wearing back his surfaces through painting, glazing, dry brushing, spattering, removing and adding, Souffrant gives his surfaces a rich texture that makes each painting feel like it has evolved over a long period of time.

While his works navigate the space between reality and imagination, his new series, This House Is Not Home, deepens an ongoing reflection on home, migration, and the search for belonging.

The title “This House Is No Home” for the exhibition for me, conceptualizes the house as both a real place and a metaphor. It can be the body, the mind, a family history, a homeland, or the memories we carry with us.
As someone who left Haiti at a young age, I’ve often found myself existing between places, cultures, and versions of myself. Home becomes something difficult to locate. It is remembered, imagined, longed for, and constantly reconstructed. In that sense, the paintings are not about a specific house, but about the feeling of searching for belonging while moving through unfamiliar landscapes, both physical and psychological.
Many of the works take place in dreamlike interiors and exteriors where reality, memory, folklore, and personal history collapse into one another. Figures appear as if caught between waking and sleeping, between past and present. Rooms become stages for encounters with ancestors, spirits, desires, fears, and fragments of memory. The familiar becomes strange, and the strange begins to feel familiar.
This « House Is Not Home » speaks to that condition of in-betweenness. It reflects the experience of displacement, migration, and transformation, but also the possibility of creating new forms of belonging. The house in these paintings is never fixed; it shifts, fractures, and reassembles itself, much like identity itself. What remains is the ongoing search for a place, real or imagined; that can finally feel like home. Olivier Souffrant

About the artist

Olivier Souffrant (b. 1994 in Port‑au‑Prince, HT, Lives and works in Chicago, IL, USA) is known for his exploration of memory, identity, and cultural narratives through a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking. His work often reflects on personal and collective histories, weaving together fragments of experience to construct layered visual worlds. He studied at the University of Illinois in Chicago and has exhibited in institutions such as The Carr Center in Detroit, MI, and the Harvey Museum in Talladega, AL. Souffrant presented his first solo exhibition at Zidoun‑Bossuyt Dubai in April 2024, followed by a second solo exhibition at Zidoun‑Bossuyt Luxembourg in February 2025. His work is held in several private and institutional collections, including the Reiffers Art Initiatives Collection (France) and the Charles Riva Collection (Belgium). His work is currently on view at Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm as part of When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, conceived and organized by Zeitz MOCAA.