Souleimane Barry’s practice is rooted in a reflection on origins and nomadic identity. Born in Burkina Faso and living between France and his country of origin, he draws on his relationship with nature, memory, and his cultural roots to develop a form of imaginary figuration where reality and the inner world converge.

Working without preparatory sketches, Barry allows human, animal, and plant figures to gradually emerge through a play of overlays and transparencies. In this way, he creates a space where forms seem to appear and then disappear, as if they were emerging from an ancient memory or a shared ground. In this process, nature constitutes a living presence, intimately linked to humanity.

Through this relationship between rootedness and displacement, Souleimane Barry conceives of identity as a living substance, in perpetual transformation. His paintings become spaces of passage, memory, and reinvention, where roots refer not only to a place of origin but also to the possibility of creating new forms of belonging.