What is a root?

This ancient word, derived from the Latin radix, first designates what ties the living being to the earth. It is the invisible yet vital organ, the one through which the plant draws its sap, its anchorage, its memory. But beyond the plant kingdom, the root is also a universal metaphor: that of our origins, our belonging, our silent transmissions. It is a word that speaks as much of the intimate as of the collective.

In this new series of paintings, Souleimane Barry explores roots in all their polysemic richness. He questions the interdependence of the living, the force of natural cycles, but also the fragility of our fundamental bonds—to nature, to the earth, to our histories. His figures, always suspended between appearance and disappearance, seem to emerge from an ancient soil, from a shared humus. Their gestures, gazes, and postures evoke both anchoring and passage.

Far from a nostalgic return to origins, Racines (Roots) is a gesture of reactivation: that of a painter returning to the depths, not to bury himself there, but to seek out new forces. It is a gaze cast backward—towards the earth, memory, the invisible—in order to bring forth a blazing present. A present crossed by uprootedness, whether geographic, cultural, or spiritual, but also by a quest for re-rooting: in the body, in the living, in a shared world.

Everything that grows, everything that holds, everything that lasts has its roots. In nature, nothing exists without an underground system, often invisible, that nourishes, stabilizes, irrigates. Trees, plants, flowers—but also gestures, languages, ritual practices, transmissions… The root is not a simple past; it is an active architecture, a condition of growth. It connects the being to a soil, but also to a dynamic of development.

As Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots, “the most important and most unknown need of the human soul” is precisely that of having roots. According to her, man, deprived of this vital link, becomes vulnerable to all forms of drift—political, moral, existential. But these roots are not conservative: they give strength, resistance, density, allowing us to inhabit the world with intensity.

Édouard Glissant, for his part, proposed another conception: the root not as unique, vertical, anchored “at the bottom of a single soil,” but multiple, shifting, in network. His “rhizomatic roots” do not oppose the Other, do not arm themselves against the outside, but mingle, branch off, intersect. They establish a relational, open, creolized identity.

Finally, Hannah Arendt shifted the perspective once again: man, unlike the tree, is not destined to remain planted in a single soil. He carries his roots within him, transports them, transforms them, redeploys them elsewhere. It is in this movement—of displacements, of exiles, of encounters—that cultures, belongings, and sensitive territories are born.

In Souleimane Barry’s work, this idea courses through the material itself. His figures seem to spring from a common soil, saturated with memory, silence, and ancient gestures. They are traversed by the sap of the world—that which binds insects to flowers, humans to the seasons, water to bodies. Racines is also a pictorial ecology: a world where each thing is held by what connects it, where nothing grows alone. For in reality, everything earthly has its roots: in the soil, in the air, in others. Art too.

For Barry, roots are not merely a symbolic motif: they incarnate themselves in the very substance of painting. The artist mixes water and oil, diverts traditional principles of compatibility, brings together what normally repels. The result is unprecedented textures, vibrating skins, fertile accidents, as if the canvas itself became a living organism, traversed by opposing forces. These mixtures give rise to unstable, organic forms that recall as much the veins of wood, the furrows of earth, as the inner flows of the body. This pictorial alchemy echoes his relationship to the world: a vision in which the heterogeneous is not denied, but fertilized. In this sense, each canvas is a soil: a place of germination, of unforeseen alliances, of silent metamorphoses. The root thus becomes a method, not a theme: it guides the gesture, links the elements, renders visible what would otherwise remain underground.

Perhaps this is where the strength of Souleimane Barry’s work resides: in this tension between rooting and wandering, between anchorage and transformation. Born in Burkina Faso, based in France, the artist inhabits a fertile in-between, where aesthetic influences, narratives of exile, and oneiric visions intersect. His roots, whether cultural, spiritual, or imaginary, never express themselves as a fixed return to origins: they become dynamic, fragmented, shifting—like Glissant’s beloved rhizome. This understanding of the root as relation runs through his painting, even in its very materiality.

Barry makes opposites converse, provokes tensions, lets unstable organic forms emerge, as if from a soil in mutation. His surfaces thus become the grounds of a pictorial germination: a humus where vegetal, animal, and human realms coexist, where deep memories echo with the contemporary. Like roots, his gestures connect, irrigate, infuse—sometimes barely visible, but always at work beneath the surface. Each canvas becomes a place of passage, of slow transformation, where something seeks to grow. To be reborn.

In a world that is coming undone, Racines invites us to re-tie bonds. To slow down. To look at what still connects us. And perhaps to relearn how to grow together.