Kathia St. Hilaire — Galerie Perrotin
Disturbing and profoundly shaped by unease, the work of the young american artist Kathia St. Hilaire, whose first exhibition in France is presented by Galerie Perrotin, unfolds her re-reading of a biased history by reinterpreting images and life stories disrupted by forms of political oppression.
Against physical coercion and the mental confinement imposed by the remnants of domination and the weight of dictatorship, spiralism sought to convey reality artistically without being trapped by its limits. As a performative and determined intention to break from any form of confinement, the movement theorized by the Haitian writer Frankétienne bent the flatness of a horizon into a continuous circular torsion that structured the plastic thread of his narratives. Rooted in this political and poetic conception, Kathia St. Hilaire’s work translates into painting this affective and affected chronology of a conjunction of histories that sensitivity, more than temporality, duplicates.
Condemned to move within these technically compelling circles, the artist’s naïve figures evoke the tragic powerlessness of the body in the face of political machines deployed across the globe, addressing the present without evading its potential infinitude, both temporal and spatial. Between staging the systemic destruction of resistance and illustrating singular deliria derived from absolute power, the exhibition titled The Vocals of The Chaotic Burst succeeds in enveloping the viewer within a polyphony whose circles trace an irrepressible groove while extending its wrenching echoes.
Of formidable ambition and effectiveness, the exhibition multiplies techniques, references, and narrative processes to generate the reliefs of art historical images filtered through a consciousness of their instructive scope. Leonardo da Vinci, Édouard Manet, Cy Twombly, and Pierre Bonnard resonate openly with the ghosts of history and the spirits of a folklore whose reality is equally performative. Layer by layer, St. Hilaire’s works reveal their complexity, housing beneath the paint a chorus of citations, gestures, and pigments which, whether visible or not, feed the lines of force in paintings whose density equals their monumentality.
Yet far from yielding to the desire for spectacle or the seductive effectiveness of an aesthetic of naïveté, her work more accurately initiates the premises of a patient construction through a dual weaving. Combining gauze and barbed wire in a syncopated progression, it offers a vertiginous panorama of an artist’s craft nourished by painting, literature, history, and science, capable of replaying the circular tragedy of a world rediscovering itself. Above all, she assimilates and renders, within her creative apparatus, the flashes and shadows of art history, which, far from being blind to power dynamics, may through their appropriation form the foundation for a more sensitive re-reading of its subjects.
By doubling this dimension with a veil that, like the elusiveness of water, attaches to perception the sense of a possible slippage, she makes those who engage with it feel the essential porosity that binds them to it.
Kathia St. Hilaire, The Vocals of The Chaotic Burst, Perrotin Gallery, 76, rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris, from January 10th to March 7th, 2026
