Perrotin Paris is pleased to present The Vocals Of The Chaotic Burst, Kathia St. Hilaire's first solo exhibition in France. Kathia St. Hilaire’s work brings together printmaking, painting, collage, and weaving to create richly textured surfaces. Her compositions are built through an intensive printmaking process, often layering dozens of impressions made from carved linoleum blocks. Ink is pressed repeatedly into the surface, producing dense fields of color and pattern shaped by time, pressure, and repetition. The layered nature of her process reflects the layered histories she explores. Born in West Palm Beach, Florida, to parents who immigrated from Haiti, St. Hilaire engages with the long and complex history of the island nation. Her work reflects the lasting effects of colonial rule, foreign occupation, and political struggle, as well as the lived experience of Haitian diasporic communities in the United States. St. Hilaire is drawn to histories that have been overlooked, erased, or deliberately silenced. She approaches these narratives by blending historical research with myth, symbolism, and imagination, an approach she has described as a form of magical realism. Her compositions hold both documented events and legendary figures, allowing fact and fiction to exist side by side.
Jérémie Vespers I // Jeremie Vespers II
St. Hilaire draws inspiration from Haitian history in this work. Jérémie, a seaside town located in northwestern Haiti, was host to a military massacre in 1964. A group of young dissenters to the dictatorship of François Duvolier arrived near Jérémie, located in a more remote and rural area, in August of 1964 and were hunted through the area by the Haitian military for three months before their final stand in November. The military massacred many in the town of Jeremie, capturing only two survivors from the original group and bringing them to Port-au-Prince for a public execution. St. Hilaire depicts the two surviving rebels here, tied to posts in Port-au-Prince and prepared for execution. Through a magical realist lens, the artist paints the scene of the execution. Without directly painting the military, the massacre, or any figures related to the regime of Duvalier, St. Hilaire alludes to these shadowy forces of chaos, and the uncertainty of life under dictatorship.
Spiral Execution
During the dictatorship of Francois Duvalier, he experienced a heart attack in 1959 that left him unconscious for over nine hours. During his hospitalization, the country was run by Clement Barbot, the head of his paramilitary group, the Tonton Macoute. Following the heart attack, it is hypothesized that Duvalier sustained neurological damage and became increasingly paranoid. He detained Barbot, convinced he was trying to gain permanent control of the country. After Barbot’s release, Duvalier became convinced that Barbot had transformed himself into a black dog, and thus ordered the Tonton Macoute to kill all black dogs in the country. Highlighting the paranoia, murkiness, and chaos of this era, St. Hilaire depicts a black dog here, running past the ankles of a man being executed by the paramilitary group.
Bato Espiral I / II
The crowded vessels that dominate her work evoke the perilous crossings that define contemporary migratory experience, particularly within the Caribbean and the broader Global South. Bodies are pressed together in precarious intimacy, caught between the promise of arrival and the certainty of risk, suspended between past and future, belonging and erasure. The sea emerges as both conduit and abyss, reflecting spiralism’s insistence that movement rarely leads to resolution and that history repeats its violence in recursive cycles. In St. Hilaire’s imagery, the boat becomes a spiral in itself—circling despair, endurance, and fleeting hope without offering closure. Migration here is less a journey than an unending search, where bodies form a living spiral, propelled forward by hope even as they remain shadowed by historical trauma and political abandonment.
St. Hilaire’s figures positioned behind barbed wire intensify this atmosphere of confinement and suspension. Here, the border no longer functions as a simple territorial marker; it becomes an interiorized apparatus of control, a psychic cage that reshapes perception and selfhood. The barbed wire does more than threaten the body—it severs speech, memory, and the capacity to imagine a future. These images resonate with literary and testimonial accounts of dictatorship and exile, in which political violence shatters subjectivity and reduces permanently unstable status: visible yet illegitimate, breathing yet circumscribed.
Guantanamo Bay I /II
This artwork vividly recalls historical photos of Haitians detained at the US Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. One scene in particular recalls the miserable fate of Haitian would-be refugees and asylum seekers who were held there in abysmal conditions in the 1990s during the military coup against Haitian President Aristide. With these detention scenes, St. Hilaire shows that history is repeating itself, focusing on present-ing the past. St. Hilaire uses sanded-down barbed wire/the impression of barbed wire to literally incorporate this sterile, harsh material which continues to separate and divide people through immigration, land, and borders.
Raynand - Tonton Macoute
Drawing inspiration from Franketienne’s novel Ready to Burst, St. Hilaire imagines a passage in which the main character, Raynand, has awoken to find himself beaten and bruised, leaning against a lamppost. Franketienne’s novel centers around Raynand’s experience and daily life during an oppressive dictatorship, though without ever directly mentioning those involved in the regime. In this scene, Raynand has been attacked by the paramilitary group Tonton Macoute, and St. Hilaire evokes the lines of the novel which describe Raynand waking in an unknown street, his body described as being on fire with pain, lost and confused.
The Tonton Macoute was created by dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and utilized as his secret police force, backed by American funding. Duvalier grew up amid the US intervention in Haiti, which was marked by racist and anti-Haitian policies. As a response, he was influenced by Noirism, a political and cultural movement which developed after the US occupation, centering the incorporation of local, Haitian culture into social and political life. Noirism was then subverted during the Duvalier era to maintain support and legitimacy during an era of heavy repression. Despite the anti-American leanings of his Noirist policies, Duvalier accepted American funding to create his paramilitary group, as the pressure to protect American shores from the reach of Communism mounted during the Cold War. St. Hilaire references this history to underscore the non-linear, chaotic reasonings and policies of Duvalier’s regime.
Vietnam Tunnels
While looking at photographs from the Duvalier regime in Haiti, St. Hilaire began to take an interest in wartime photography from other areas around the same period. In Ready to Burst, Frankétienne mentions the Vietnam War, which unfolded during Duvalier’s regime (1957–1971). In this work, she depicts a Vietnamese citizen emerging from a tunnel constructed to evade US forces during the Vietnam War. Linking the experienced conflicts in Haiti to the conflicts in Vietnam, St. Hilaire explores the unified chaos of warfare on the everyday civilians, who must adapt to the ever-changing circumstances of danger in their daily lives. In this sense, St. Hilaire views Spiralism as extending to this Vietnamese citizen, wrapped up in the chaos and tumult of quotidian conflict.
Trenches
While looking at photographs from the Duvalier regime in Haiti, St. Hilaire began to take an interest in wartime photography from other areas around the same period. Inspired by photographs of World War I trenches and the frequent use of barbed wire, St. Hilaire extends her Spiralist lens to the Western front. She was drawn to barbed wire for its coiled, spiraled form, as well as its historical use across warfare, immigration, and violent occupations, and here the material itself is imprinted into the canvas. To St. Hilaire, the spirals of the wire evoke the chalkboard paintings of Cy Twombly from which she also draws inspiration, which were created around the time of Duvalier’s Haitian dictatorship.
In the first spiralist novel, Ready to Burst (1968), Frankétienne frequently disrupts his protagonists’ narrative with autobiographical interjections, introducing lyrical outbursts into an already unstable structure. These dreams, anecdotes, and poems coalesce into a portrait of the author’s formative years as a marginalized youth in Haiti. Within the novel’s carefully orchestrated chaos, the ordinary and the extraordinary intersect, and the autobiographical often appears more surreal than the fictional. Recalling news of a distant war fought on faraway shores—namely, World War II—the narrator reflects:
The episodes of war, distorted by the popular imagination, seasoned with a dash of the marvelous, populated our interior lives. Our heads were potpourris of nightmares and bloody dreams. Hitler was introduced to me by my cousin (who didn’t know much more than I did) as some sort of dragon. A magician. … Waking at night to use the toilet, I was actually afraid that I’d find him in my room—with that lock of hair on his furious forehead and that nervous mustache.
In our neighborhood, Bel Air, there lived an Italian named Papito, a deserter from Mussolini's army. Taking advantage of the black market, he'd been able to make some money selling soap made out of guaiacum wood….And I'm not sure why, but today these two facts are permanently linked in my memory: Lescot's unthinking bravado and the suicide by hanging of Papito the Italian.
Vagabondiana
In this work, St. Hilaire takes inspiration from John Thomas Smith's Vagabondiana series, which consists of engravings of wanderers and beggars in 19th century London. Smith published caricatures of the lower classes of London while working as Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum in 1817. St. Hilaire focuses on one engraving of Joseph Johnson, an immigrant and a former sailor in the British merchant navy who was discharged without a pension before settling in London. Without any recourse or stability after his service, Johnson became a street performer in Whitechapel. Constructing a toy boat of the ship Nelson, on which he had served, Johnson is depicted with the boat atop his cap, leaning on crutches.
Vitruvian Man Raynand I / II
Drawing inspiration from Franketienne’s novel Ready to Burst, St. Hilaire imagines a passage in which the main character, Raynand, finds himself splayed across a desolate intersection. Franketienne’s novel centers around Raynand’s experience and daily life during an oppressive dictatorship, though without ever directly mentioning those involved in the regime. In this scene, Raynand has been attacked by the paramilitary group Tonton Macoute. Limbs splayed across the pavement, St. Hilaire’s Raynand assumes the position of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Da Vinci’s drawing was a study of the ideal human proportions, steeped in scientific inquiry and artistic vision. St. Hilaire employs it here to convey a relation between nature and Spiralism, repeating the spiraled form of barbed wire across the canvas.
Papa Doc
The Duvalier regimes’ (1957–1986) authoritarian control reshaped Haiti’s political, social, and psychological landscape. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and later Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” consolidated power through systemic violence, censorship, and the militarized terror of the Tonton Macoutes, collapsing distinctions between state authority and personal fear. Everyday life became governed by surveillance, arbitrary imprisonment, forced disappearance, and economic strangulation, producing a climate in which instability was not episodic but structural. Migration—often clandestine and perilous—emerged as both a material necessity and an existential horizon, while those who remained were subjected to an atmosphere of enclosure, silence, and psychic erosion. Rather than generating a singular historical narrative, the Duvalier era cultivated a persistent condition of rupture and disorientation, in which bodies, language, and memory were continually under threat.
Raised during the US occupation of Haiti rife with violent and racist conflicts, Duvalier went on to study medicine, first in Haiti, and then at the University of Michigan. Upon returning to Haiti, he became a popular doctor, travelling to rural areas to cure disease. Duvalier became known to many Haitian citizens across the country in his public health campaigns to stop the spread of tropical diseases. Many of his patients in rural areas were deeply connected to the Voudon religion, and not well versed in medicine, and thus thought he had magical abilities to heal the sick, which he embraced though he knew his powers rested in modern medicine such as penicillin. Thus, he assumed the nickname “Papa Doc”. Rising in popularity, his cult of personality led to his election as president in 1957 on a black nationalist, or Noirist, platform. Through the submission of a 1958 military coup, Duvalier assumed autocratic control of the government. He created a paramilitary group called the Tonton Macoute, which served as a secret police force, torturing and killing his enemies as well as any dissenters. During his reign, many Haitian citizens lived in fear and chaos.
Artwork Construction & Text incorporation
Inspired heavily by Franketienne’s writings and paintings, St. Hilaire honors the Spiralist founder by incorporating his words into her paintings. St. Hilaire selected two phrases:
Every day I employ the dialect of mad cyclones
I speak the lunacy of contrary winds
St. Hilaire began her signature relief print canvases creating her own stencils, then carving them into linoleum sheets, which were then employed in a printing press to create patterns of flora and fauna. These were printed on a collection of diverse, unconventional materials, such as studio scraps, shredded tires, ripped-up banknotes, sugarcane bagasse, banana leaves, oil-based prints, fabrics, metal, paper, glue, pigments, thread, and packaging from skin lightening creams. Once printed, St. Hilaire used an afro comb to etch lines or spirals into the surface of the canvas, creating direction and texture. On this layered surface, St. Hilaire then carved Frankétienne’s phrases into linoleum, pressed them onto her canvas, and pochoir printed on top of them.
St. Hilaire’s references reach throughout art history. She is particularly inspired by painters such as Pierre Bonnard , woodblock print techniques, and the chalkboard paintings of Cy Twombly, all of which can be felt through her new body of work.
Ball chain walls
St. Hilaire often uses some form of curtain, made of metal or mesh, to suspend her artworks in her exhibitions. For this exhibition, St. Hilaire wanted to recall Spiralist waves and circles by suspending the artworks on a ball chain curtain, assembled by hand using afro combs to create the desired patterns. In using this metal material, St. Hilaire evokes the sterile feeling of a fence, both lustrous and menacing. St. Hilaire was also reminded of the rust on the metal Superdome in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, where many people took shelter during the storm. The form is also drawn from the opening lines of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst:
More effective at setting each twig acquiver in the passing of waves than a pebble dropped into a pool of water, Spiralism defines life at the level of relations… and historical connections… Not in a closed circuit, but tracing the path of the spiral. So rich that each new curve, wider and higher than the one before, expands the arc of one’s vision.
Meditating on the idea of a drop of water, and likening drops of water to the beading in Haitian Vodoun flags, St. Hilaire chose to suspend her works on a backdrop that inspired movement and rhythm in the space.
Born in West Palm Beach, USA
Lives and works in New York
Informed by her experience growing up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida, the artist seeks to memorialize the communities that she has been a part of through innovative printmaking techniques. Her work draws inspiration from Haitian Vodun flags, which are used to tell the country’s history and honor ancestral spirits. Using nontraditional materials such as beauty products, industrial metal, fabric or tires, she creates ornate tapestries that seek to preserve the Haitian history and Vodun religion that lives around us in Miami.
Kathia St. Hilaire received her M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut and her B.F.A. in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work has recently been featured in solo shows at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA; Perrotin, New York, NY; and the NSU Art Museum Ft. Lauderdale, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; as well as group exhibitions at the Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs; Half Gallery, New York; Blum & Poe, New York; and James Fuentes, New York.
More about the artist
