Payas

Pierre-Sylvain Augustin, known throughout the Haitian art world simply as Payas, was a self-taught painter who came to art late in life and became one of the defining voices of the second generation of the Saint-Soleil movement. Born on 12 December 1941 in Divette, a rural locality of Pétion-Ville in the hills above Port-au-Prince, he spent most of his adult life as a farmer and then a mason before he ever picked up a brush. He died in the night of 23 to 24 October 2026, at the age of 84, as reported by Le Nouvelliste and its editor-in-chief Frantz Duval.

Payas grew up close to Soissons-la-Montagne, the mountain village where the painter and ceramist Jean-Claude Garoute, known as Tiga, had founded the Saint-Soleil community in the 1970s. Saint-Soleil brought together peasant farmers from the area and encouraged them to paint spontaneously, drawing on dreams, spirits and the rural Haitian imagination. The movement famously captivated the French writer and former culture minister André Malraux, who visited in 1975 and devoted a chapter of his book L'Intemporel to it.

For decades Payas lived beside this world without belonging to it. He worked the fields, then took up construction work. In 1992 he built a house next to Prospère Pierre-Louis, one of the most celebrated Saint-Soleil painters, and he often came by to watch his neighbour at work. According to the biography circulated by Galerie Monnin in Pétion-Ville, Payas never imagined he would paint himself until he sensed that Prospère was working on his final, unfinished canvas, several days before Prospère's death in November 1996. Marked by that loss, and by what he described as the influence of Prospère's spirit and voice, he began to paint on his own.

In January 1997 he brought his first drawing to Tiga. The founder of Saint-Soleil encouraged him and introduced him to the second Saint-Soleil festival at Soissons-la-Montagne that same year. In 1998 Payas was one of the thirteen artists Tiga presented as Les Nouveaux Saint-Soleil at the Institut Français d'Haïti in Port-au-Prince, a group Tiga defined as painters who did not fall into repeating the traditional forms but brought a new breath to the movement. That year his work was also shown at the World Bank in Washington. From then on he appeared in nearly every major exhibition devoted to Saint-Soleil and was widely regarded as an artisan of its renewal in the 2000s.

His career took him far beyond the Haitian hills. He exhibited at the Galerie Bourbon Lally in Pétion-Ville (1999), at the Galerie Antoinette Jean in Paris (1999 and 2003), at the Outsider Art Fair in New York (2000 and 2002) and in Haïti, anges et démons at the Halle Saint Pierre museum in Paris (2000). Later shows included Vaudou at the Abbaye de Daoulas in Brittany (2004), exhibitions in Warsaw and at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków (2004 and 2005), Haïti : vers demain in Paris where he was guest of honour (2005), Haïti : 200 ans d'histoire à partager at TOHU in Montreal (2006) and Peintures haïtiennes d'inspiration vaudou at the Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux (2007). In Haiti he showed with Jean-Louis Maxan at the Institut Français (2008 to 2009), in Saint Soley Jodia at Galerie Nader (2009) and in Pulsions silencieuses with his pupil Ery at Les Ateliers Jérôme (2010). He was also a faithful presence at the annual Artisanat en fête fair in Pétion-Ville, where Le Nouvelliste found him in December 2023, still at his stand in his eighties.

What made Payas singular was the tension at the heart of his faith. He was a preacher at the Baptist church of Soissons-la-Montagne, a church that publicly opposed Vodou, and his imagery came straight from the Bible, with the cross appearing again and again. Yet his canvases were also crowded with the spirits and serpent forms that run through Saint-Soleil painting. Les Ateliers Jérôme described his work as a powerful expression of religious syncretism, where the Vodou spirit Bosou walks through the earthly paradise. Payas himself put it plainly: he was conscious of painting Christ, but when Bosou slipped into the canvas he was stunned. He said he always prayed before starting a work and kept praying until it was finished, and that he would not touch a brush if he did not feel well in his soul.

Payas also became a teacher. A younger generation of painters learned from him, among them Eriveaux Prosper, known as Ery, who moved toward abstraction. His son Rousseau Augustin also paints in the Saint-Soleil style, and dealers have presented the two as a father and son duo carrying the tradition forward. In a statement recorded around 2013, Payas said he had nine children and had been married twice.

He leaves behind a body of luminous, spiritually charged paintings held by collectors and galleries in Haiti, North America and Europe, and a life story that remains one of the most striking in Haitian art: a mason and farmer who became a painter in his mid fifties after the death of a friend, and who kept painting for almost three decades.