A Haitian Creole phrase about crossing water gives Didier William's first French solo exhibition its title and its emotional centre. Lot Bo D'lo A (The Other Side of the Water) opened at Galerie Peter Kilchmann's Marais space in Paris on 19 October 2026 and runs to 19 December, bringing together thirteen new paintings alongside Gesture to Home, a work from 2024. It is the artist's second exhibition with the gallery.

William was born in Port-au-Prince in 1983 and moved with his family to Miami at the age of six; he now lives and works in Philadelphia. That biography runs through the new paintings without turning them into illustration. Figures dissolve into water, shoreline and vegetation, and bodies appear as hybrids rather than portraits, as if identity itself were something carried across a crossing rather than fixed on one shore. The show's language of tides, roots and half-remembered places speaks to migration and displacement, but also to the persistence of memory after arrival.

The timing places the exhibition inside a busy Paris art week, yet its concerns are quieter than the fair circuit around it. William trained at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Yale School of Art, and his work has previously been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami and in Basel's Art Unlimited sector. Here, the emphasis falls on painting as a way of holding several places at once: Haiti, Miami, Philadelphia and the imagined stretch of water between them.

For a gallery whose Paris programme has increasingly platformed artists working outside Western art centres, the show fits a clear pattern. It introduces a painter whose reputation has grown mainly in the United States to a French audience, and it does so with new work rather than a survey, asking Paris viewers to meet the practice at its current point of development.