INNER LANDSCAPES

Inner Landscapes brings together Sébastien Bouchard and Victoria Oniosun in a sensitive exploration of the body as an inner space — a territory shaped by experience, memory, and intimacy.

For both artists, the body is above all an inhabited territory, a witness to lived experience. It absorbs the tensions of the world, holds the layers of personal and collective history, and is shaped over time by what has been lived, felt, and internalized. The body thus becomes a sensitive landscape, charged with memory and emotion.

Victoria Oniosun’s figures unfold within hushed, introspective spaces. Through a painterly language rich in texture and silence, she explores femininity, identity, and inner states. Her characters appear suspended in moments of recentering, as if withdrawing from the outside world in order to inhabit their own depth more fully.

In Sébastien Bouchard’s work, the portrait becomes a site of recomposition. The faces and bodies he paints bear the marks of hybridity, otherness, and cultural métissage. By layering references, eras, and imaginaries, he gives form to complex identities shaped by encounters, movement, and multiple belongings.

In Inner Landscapes, the body is both refuge and surface of inscription. It reveals what remains unspoken, what is built in silence: emotions, resistance, fragility, but also inner strength.

The dialogue between the two artists brings forth a sensitive cartography of being — a space where the intimate and the social meet, where identity is understood not as a fixed form, but as a living material in constant transformation.

CV Victoria Oniosun

VICTORIA ONIOSUN

Victoria Oniosun Erioluwa (born 1998 in Oyo, Nigeria) is a contemporary painter whose work explores inner landscapes, femininity, and the construction of personal and collective identity in today’s society.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine and Applied Arts from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife (2022), and a Master’s degree from the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, UK. Her practice is primarily expressed through painting.

Victoria Oniosun develops a highly material and tactile body of work, characterized by thick, layered paint applied with a palette knife, giving her canvases a strong physical presence. Moving between figuration and abstraction, her compositions often depict anonymous figures with deliberately undefined features, alongside evocative landscapes. The body becomes a site of projection — a sensitive territory where emotions, memories, and inner states accumulate.

Her work questions the place of women, notions of belonging, and the tensions between intimacy and the external world. The landscapes she paints are never purely descriptive; they function as mental spaces — places of refuge, reconstruction, and contemplation. Through a palette dominated by organic tones and subtle contrasts, she constructs a deeply human visual language, leaving space for the viewer’s own interpretation.

Her work has been presented in numerous international exhibitions and art fairs, including Scope Art Fair Miami (2025), 1-54 Art Fair New York (2025), Art X Lagos (2025), The Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Southampton, New York (2024), and +234 Art Fair Lagos (2024).

Victoria Oniosun is the winner of the 2024 MANI Art Competition and was selected for the Lantern Art Space Fellowship Program 2024, among other distinctions. The different phases of her practice — from early explorations to her current work — have been shown throughout these exhibitions, revealing a coherent and evolving artistic journey.

She currently lives and works between Canterbury and Folkestone, United Kingdom.

CV Seb Bouchard

SEB BOUCHARD

Sébastien Bouchard (born 1971, France) is a painter and muralist whose practice explores singularity, otherness, and hybrid identities through portraiture and visual constructions. His artistic gaze was shaped from an early age through numerous journeys between France and Senegal, a country he first discovered at the age of ten. These repeated stays in West Africa, between the ages of 10 and 30, deeply nourished his artistic sensibility. Accompanying his father to artists’ studios in Dakar, he had a formative encounter with drawing, color, and visual expression, and very early on decided that art would be his vocation.

Back in France, Sébastien Bouchard pursued formal art studies and graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire in 1996. The years that followed were marked by an intense period of creative exploration: music production, graphic design, and fashion all contributed to shaping his sensibility and expanding his visual language.

In the early 2000s, he returned to Africa—first to Conakry, Guinea, then to Senegal from 2005 onward—where he established his studio in the Siné Saloum region. There, he regularly presented his work in major cultural events such as the OFF Biennale of Dakar, as well as in cultural institutions across West Africa, including in Mali, Mauritania, and The Gambia.

From 2010 onward, he has divided his time between France and Senegal, collaborating with artist collectives and galleries in West Africa and Europe. Alongside his studio practice, Sébastien Bouchard has developed a strong public art practice, creating large-scale murals in the United States, Europe, and Africa. His work asserts a vibrant aesthetic that inhabits urban space as much as it does the gallery.

At the heart of his work, portraiture becomes a means of questioning the complexity of identity, exploring cultural encounters, and celebrating hybridity. By layering elements drawn from different eras, traditions, and imaginaries, he creates figures that appear both familiar and singular—faces that embody plurality, in-betweenness, and the richness of cultural mixing.

Sébastien Bouchard seeks to merge popular art and fine art, developing a visual language rooted both in collective memory and in an open, contemporary modernity. His work can be read as a cartography of inner worlds, where painting translates fractures, encounters, and the ongoing recomposition of the contemporary subject.