Olivier Jean-Daniel Souffrant is a portrait of an artist as a young man. If you were to pluck Olivier from modern times and send him back in time to 1920’s Harlem, he would fit right in. Surely his work is inspired by Basquiat, but not in the way most people would think. The homage to Basquiat is not an allusion, but an honest snapshot of the inner workings of his mind translated on the canvas, whether it be it a fleeting thought, a word, color block, or a sketch or doodle. There’s a certain raw element in his approach to his work that you can see in his stroke and in the way that he interacts with the canvas. It’s finished, yet a work in progress. It’s what happens when minimalism meets collage, and when an old soul lives in modern times.