Olivier Souffrant

It’s a credit to Olivier Souffrant that he speaks so highly of our digital world. Not to say I don’t find the advantages of a good Google Image search, but Souffrant feels genuinely excited to be an artist making work in 2026. I met him first in his makeshift studio on a rooftop in Mexico City, ahead of exhibiting work with STEMS Gallery at the world renowned ZONAMACO fair, because it seems like the ideal vantage point to finish his paintings. It’s beside the point that he just came from Chicago in the dead of winter to one of the great art metropolises that tends to have weather one would call temperate in January, because his excitement seems palpable beyond location. Born Olivier Jean-Daniel Souffrant in 1994 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the Chicago painter is confidently and happily chasing his heroes. He doesn’t hide his influences and the ways in which they shape his visual aesthetic. The nods to Basquiat, Beardon, Picasso are all there and intended to be so.

I find all of this to be pleasantly surprising and refreshing: an artist unafraid to embrace the past and present, but also an artist uninhibited to ask difficult questions about the future of art-making and the gallery-driven art market. I mention his confidence as a strong point because there is something else he wants from this career path: to give art back to people but also to not be the poster child or embodiment of expectation. He wants to be Olivier and he wants to stand on the shoulders of giants and he wants it to be vividly obvious. What he believes, and what I believe in seeing the works in person and speaking to him, is that contemporary inventiveness mixed with understanding the DNA structure of the work of past masters will create something original and undoubtedly, him. In other words, he is daring himself to be great.