PARIS.- Spirals are everywhere in acclaimed Haitian American artist Kathia St. Hilaire’s mesmerizing new show. All of the kaleidoscopic and almost psychedelic swirling patterns will draw the viewer into each vortex. Through the repeating spirals, the artist memorializes Frankétienne (1936–2025) —the giant of Haitian literature and art—who passed away at his home in Delmas, Port-au-Prince on 20 February 2025, aged 88. Combined, the show’s spirals pay tribute to Frankétienne as co-founder of the Haitian literary movement Spiralism, which emerged from Haiti in the mid-1960s, during the ultra-repressive father-and-son dynastic dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1957–1986). According to Frankétienne, the Spiral is life itself because it is nature’s most oft-repeated paradigm and the basis of its component structures in astronomy, geometry and biology. Inspired by Frankétienne, St. Hilaire enacts/represents multiple Spirals across the show. Indeed, each artwork is a unique creative response to a line from Frankétienne’s first Spiral novel, first published in 1968 at the height of Papa Doc’s dictatorship. This novel titled Ready to Burst contains a literary manifesto of Spiralism as the narratives of the book trace the path of the Spiral.

Each of Kathia St. Hilaire’s artworks draw the viewer in so that every intricate detail can be grasped. Only when viewed up close can the viewer make out the line of inked writing which serves as the spark of that piece. This exhibition brings Spiralism and the first Spiralist novel Ready to Burst back to life. The artworks visualize the story of Raynand as he struggles to survive under the oppressive dictatorship from day to day. Raynand is pictured in two flipped images as passed out at road intersections—the sacred crossroads of Haitian Vodou. Certain works recall Raynand’s nightmarish attempt to escape Haiti for Nassau in the Bahamas where he is detained and then forcibly deported back to where he came from.

While the Spiral form is often represented as liberating, St. Hilaire also focuses on failed attempts of Haitian, Caribbean and Latin American migration and vicious circles of mass detention and deportation. Barbed wire is everywhere in this show and a number of artworks depict the incarceration of Haitian and other Caribbean/Latin American detainees. One work featuring barbed wire 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 at Gitmo in abysmal conditions in the 1990s during the military coup against Haitian President Aristide. As Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat has suggested, these snapshots of Haitian experiences from the 1990s offer a preview of what is to come in the near future, given the recent directive to expand the Migrant Operations Center in Guantanamo Bay into a 30,000-bed detention centre. Saint-Hilaire reincarnates a group of Haitian detainees with their interlocked hands above their heads in a gesture meaning tèt chaje: we are in serious trouble and can’t take anymore... With the detention scenes, St. Hilaire shows that history is repeating itself during the current raids, detainment and deportation of foreign ‘others’ especially in the US, but other places around the world too. St. Hilaire, like Frankétienne and his fellow-Spiralists, focuses on present-ing the past, and showing how challenging circumstances continue in the present during the current unprecedented Haitian crises of gang violence and ensekirite (widespread social/political violence).

Multiple spirals also depict hurricanes and the spiral form associated with these adverse weather events. The artist has spoken of being drawn to the form of hurricanes on weather radars. What attracts her to hurricanes is that they are deadly, but there is also something beautiful and powerful about these mighty natural forces. Another literary inspiration here is the great storm and never-ending rainfall which are so central to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. This is one of the key texts of magical realism; a genre which is imprinted in St. Hilaire’s art. García Márquez’s novel depicts a fictional storm which completely wipes out a whole city and all memories of it. Magical/Marvelous Realism or MR/Multiple Representation according to Kamau Brathwaite’s formulation are central to the genealogies of Caribbean, especially Haitian, and Latin America literature and art through figures including Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Alejo Carpentier, among others.

There are synergies between St. Hilaire’s work and vibrant Spiralist and Magical Realist dreamlike visions where past and present come together along with the suggestion of possible futures. St. Hilaire points out that the path of most of today’s hurricanes follows the routes of the transatlantic slave trade vessels. These hurricane spirals also speak to the belief that hurricanes are actually the vengeance of the millions of captive Africans who died during the perilous Middle Passage journey. The artist is interested in the idea of hurricanes starting on the water. Her works braid together hurricanes, water and hair braids, as she re-members past and present experiences in bell hooks’s sense of the coming together of severed parts, the fragments becoming whole. Some works reimagine through the shapes of plants and green vegetation, the women who braided seeds into their hair; a process involving the literal archiving and transportation of treasured heritage on these abysmal forced voyages away from their African ancestral lands. There are also connections here between water, quilting and the piecing together of memories, as St. Hilaire links piece-by-piece through collage techniques.

She weaves together her mother’s stories about past hurricanes, including David which hit Haiti so badly in 1979, but also the ravages of repeating deadly hurricanes every season across the Caribbean and South Gulf regions, including Katrina (2005), Matthew (2016) and Melissa (2025). Hurricanes thus link to water where currents and waves braid together. This show also braids together the harrowing journeys of the Middle Passage with more recent journeys of Haitian and Cuban boatpeople, amongst others, on rickety, unseaworthy and overcrowded boats. The artist foregrounds ordinary people trying to leave harsh, unlivable conditions to ‘chèche lavi’ in search of a better life. Climate change is an important issue for St. Hilaire—currently, warming oceans are making hurricanes more frequent and ferocious, leading to significantly heavier rainfall and ever-worsening flooding capable of wiping out whole places from the map.

Magical Realism is used by the artist as a tool to talk about history. Swirling visions of past and present forge together across the show’s phantasmagorical sequences. Here, the imprint of Spiralism, Magical Realism and Haitian Surrealism is everywhere. Her magical-marvelous content offers a visual artistic language of printmaking, painting, mark- and world-making processes. Across multiple canvases and panels, there are swirling visions of repeating scenes from Haitian, Caribbean, Latin American and diasporic history.

St. Hilaire’s works are multifaceted, reflecting the Spiral-Magical Realist form. She breathes magic into her art through her printmaking signature aesthetic, which is multilayered to the max. She has pioneered a unique technique of reduction relief printing inspired heavily by French Impressionism, which distinctively combines relief printmaking, collage, carving, weaving, and sewing. She starts with a large drawing and then transfers this onto linoleum sheets. Next, she painstakingly carves out each section. These are then printed on a whole collection of diverse, unconventional materials, which are as mixed as possible. This vast array of mixed media includes detritus/ studio scraps, shredded tires, ripped-up banknotes, sugarcane bagasse, banana leaves, oil-based prints, fabrics, metal, paper, glue, pigment, thread and packaging from skin lightening creams. By collaging these materials together, she builds up as many as fifty layers of ink using the carved linoleum blocks, which create extraordinary textural effects. Scrap metal is also used. This recalls the ‘brasaj’ of metals in the distinctive Haitian metal art which was made in Noailles/Croix-des-Bouquets, a village recently terrorized by violent gangs which has led to the displacement of countless Haitian metal artists.

Metal and actual barbed wire is incorporated into these large collages where it is sanded down so that it looks like paint. This barbed wire has deep meaning for many people, especially for refugees and asylum seekers seeking to reach Europe and the US throughout past decades and especially recently, with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s campaign of relentless, aggressive immigration raids, detention and mass deportation. Barbed wire is used to keep people in or out, and is related to creating boundaries of incarceration. Metal is the major component of the carefully crafted Spiral bead walls which are the imposing backdrop for St. Hilaire’s canvases. These chainlink fences behind the artworks are crafted by the artist using ball chain beads and connectors. Repeatedly, St. Hilaire engages with borders and gestures towards widespread border violence and abuses, as she memorializes infamous detention centers, especially Guantanamo Bay.

The beading and magical assemblages of the show are just some of the way in which St. Hilaire emulates Vodou drapo—the beaded and sequined flags of Haitian Vodou, the syncretic religion of Haiti, which is a major inspiration for her. Her Vodou-inspired artwork especially reimagines the magnificent, large-scale and intricate drapo of Myrlande Constant (1968–) and the dizzyingly abundant Vodou altar assemblages of Pierrot Barra (1942–1999). St. Hilaire’s art is inspired by Vodou symbolism, which she takes in a Magical Realist-Spiralist direction, reflecting the magical attributes and objects which empower the resistance of practitioners in life’s struggles. St. Hilaire creates her own Vodou drapo by reworking vèvè—the sacred symbols of Haitian Vodou—which represent specific Lwa or Vodou spirits, summoning them to our world so that they can intervene in our human affairs. Constant has described how she paints and beads “hope”. St. Hilaire does not employ sequin but brings printmaking and a vast array of different recyclable objects and textured surfaces to her distinctive drapo. These are then recollaged back into her distinctive, heterogeneous mark-making gestures and assemblages to create hope even in these challenging times.

In the Eye of the Spiral
Dr Rachel Douglas, BA (Hons), MSc, PhD