LOUISE SARTOR

Since her first paintings on torn paper, she has made this attraction to damaged material into a strength, or compositional procedure. The exercise is thus complexified and restricted differently than by the traditional laws of the genre. Her paintings with their classic techniques used on the versos, backs or interiors of massmarket packaging, accentuates our physical relation with the work. At a time when the Instagrammable has overtaken the reproductible, she thus brings to mind the reduced, standardised format of images on smartphones and tablets. These tools, regularly used to draw from life, have allowed her to improve her grasp of composition. In her paintings, they have also influenced the treatment of colours, which she now saturates with neither artifice nor any tenderness towards nature.

The exhibition combines a series of never-before-seen portraits with views that obstinately depict the same motif: the sky as seen from her studio. At a time when the generalised formatting of digital images seems patiently to be orchestrating the world’s vacuity, through the sharpness of her stare and the diversity of her artifices, Louise Sartor attests to the enduring power of images.