PASSAGES
CENTRE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN
9 RUE JEANNE D'ARC — TROYES
Louise Sartor is a French painter born in 1988. She currently lives and works in Paris.
After studying scenography, she turned her artistic practice towards painting, focusing on classical subjects and themes such as the female body, portraiture, landscapes, and still lifes. Gouache is her preferred medium, although her technique varies depending on the support. The support itself is a defining feature of her work: she exclusively uses reclaimed materials, primarily cardboard from food packaging, but also found objects such as fans, boxes, or canvas shoes, which may require acrylic or oil paint.
“The choice of cardboard as a pictorial support is a key entry point into the economy of Louise Sartor’s work. A humble material born of the consumer chain, it expresses both an aesthetic and political stance: to paint on cardboard is to reject the traditional hierarchy of artistic materials—one that elevates canvas as the noble support par excellence—while embracing a closeness to the ordinary and the everyday. Cardboard introduces into painting a sense of instability, fragility, and familiarity. It evokes an ostensibly ‘banal’ material, tied to circulation and exchange, but also to the possibility of creating with accessible means, available everywhere and at any time. Yet the pieces of cardboard on which the artist paints are not so ‘simple.’ Each has its own specific shape—often asymmetrical, sometimes torn, always singular, and ultimately unique to a single painting. This gesture, this reversal (…) opens up a critical space that asks: what do we produce when we paint? What is valued? What do we choose to represent, and on what support?”
(Oriane Durand)
Louise Sartor has recently exhibited at Galerie Crèvecœur in Paris (France), Page in New York (USA), Bel Ami in Los Angeles (USA), and at art centres including La Synagogue de Delme (France), Treignac Projet (France), Le Consortium in Dijon (France), and MO.CO. Panacée in Montpellier (France). Her work has also been shown at the Jean-Honoré Fragonard Museum in Grasse (France), the Picasso Museum Málaga (Spain), MASC in Les Sables-d’Olonne (France), Mucem in Marseille (France), X Museum in Beijing (China), and the Institut Français in Tokyo (Japan), among others.
She was a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2019–2020. Her work is held in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, MAMCO – Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva (Switzerland), and the FRAC collections of Poitou-Charentes, Burgundy, and Corsica.
For several years now, Louise Sartor has focused on painting the direct view from the windows of the many places where she has lived and worked. Rooted in the long tradition of landscape painting, these frontal depictions of the immediate view from a window recall Leon Battista Alberti’s famous definition of the painting as a “window onto the world” in his 1435 treatise De Pictura.
At the same time, this practice is an exercise in presence. Remaining before the same landscape over an extended period, often producing several paintings with identical compositions that differ only according to light, weather, or the changing seasons—in the spirit of Monet’s Poplars or Cathedrals series—becomes an exploration of perception, time, and attentive observation. This sustained act of looking resonates with notions of mindfulness and meditation found across many spiritual and religious traditions.
During her residency at Passages, the magnificent Ginkgo biloba tree that quite literally fills the window frame will become the central subject of her work. The gradual transformations of its foliage—from its changing colours to its complete loss of leaves, eventually revealing the rest of the garden like a theatrical unveiling at the end of the year—will be captured in a series of paintings, adding a new chapter to the growing repertoire of window views that the artist has been developing over time.
