Z(S)ONA MACO: Centro Banamex, Mexico City

 

Souffrant’s practice is shaped by a dialogue between art historical references and lived experience. His visual language draws inspiration from African American artists such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Jean-Michel Basquiat, while also engaging with European masters including Botticelli, Van Gogh, and Picasso. These influences inform compositions where figuration, interior space, and symbolic layering converge, creating psychologically rich environments.

 

The works presented are also deeply informed by Souffrant’s personal and collective history, particularly the sociopolitical aftermath of the 2004 coup d’état in Haiti and the lasting impact of the 2010 earthquake. Rather than depicting trauma literally, the paintings explore how beauty and resilience endure within instability, emotional tension, and lived complexity.

 

The six paintings unfold as compressed, intimate spaces in which figures navigate visibility, agency, and emotional presence. In Woman Behind the Veil, Souffrant reflects on the legacy of Frida Kahlo, portraying a figure who chooses what to reveal and what to conceal, draping her pain in grace and pattern. The Handler of My Handler explores control and relational dynamics, where authority is enacted through distance and subtle gestures rather than force. In Sinners in the Dark, quiet intimacy emerges in nocturnal interiors, where the suspension of time and conventional structure allows tenderness to surface. La Hacienda situates stillness within urban density, capturing everyday life while highlighting moments of composed grace. So He Dreamt... evokes dreamlike interiors where memory, desire, and observation coexist, while Olympia (Return of the Prodigal Son) examines the fragile tension of return and exposure, where being seen becomes both complex and charged.

 

Presented in Mexico, Beauty Behind the Madness resonates with a cultural context where figuration has long served as a vessel for personal, political, and collective expression. Echoing Mexican artistic traditions that embrace emotional intensity and lived experience, Souffrant’s works propose beauty not as resolution or spectacle, but as a quiet, persistent force — present not despite complexity, but within it.