Louise Sartor’s solo exhibition brings together a series of paintings and drawings realised over the past three seasons at Moulin des Ribes in Grasse. Executed on cardboard or as digital drawings, the works revolve around two central motifs: that of the cypress tree and the bouquet of withered flowers. Beneath these realistically-rendered representations borrowing from a classical style, the choice of medium, as well as the juxtaposition of two vegetal states — one persistent, the other in decline — articulates a broader reflection on the temporalities of living things, cycles of transformation, and modalities in the way images come into being.

The choice of cardboard packaging as a pictorial support is an essential entry point into the economy of Louse Sartor’s work. A humble material from the consumer chain, it signals both an aesthetic and political positioning: to paint on cardboard is to reject a traditional material hierarchy — that which crowns canvas as the noble material par excellence — while suggesting a proximity to the ordinary and quotidian. Cardboard introduces into the field of painting a sense of instability, a precariousness, a form of familiarity. It gestures toward the ‘banal’ and to logics of circulation and exchange, but it also points to possibilities of creation with accessible and readily available means. And yet, the pieces of cardboard on which Sartor paints are not quite so ‘simple’. Each has a specific shape — often asymmetrical, sometimes torn, always singular and ultimately unique for the painting is carries. This gesture, this inversion — similar to strategies employed by artists like Thomas Hirschorn or Richard Tuttle, for whom cardboard operates as a fragile and seemingly worthless support — opens up a critical space, asking: What is produced within the act of painting? What is given value? What is represented, and on what ground(s)?

Multiplied across deliberately chosen pieces of cardboard, the cypress motif performs its own inversion — first and foremost on a symbolic level. Quintessentially Mediterranean, the cypress is often associated with cemeteries and mourning, yet it is also an evergreen, emblematic of immortality and longevity due to its year-round foliage. Van Gogh, who painted numerous representations of the cypress, described it as a tree that ‘connects the earth and the sky.’ This cosmic dimension is in full evidence in Nuit étoilée à Saint-Rémy (1888), where the cypress arises from the darkness like a dark flame onto which the stars seem to cling. In Louise Sartor’s series, the nearly obsessive reiteration of the motif, combined with a formal rigour in its verticality, produces a sense of momentum and ascendent movement that seems to defy entropy. From one painting to the next, it is not the tree that changes, but its surroundings: the sky, the light, other nearby foliage. This minimal variation between works reveals a form of continuous vitality that transcends the modest support on which it unfurls.

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What remains central in Sartor’s work is the persistence of a gaze turned toward elementary forms — a tree, a flower, a vase — not in an effort to extract their essence, but to recast and reactivate their presence within contemporary material and symbolic conditions. The act of painting becomes a gesture of measurement denoting the space between things, between images, between states of living. It is also a way of thinking through duration, passage, and transformation. ‘From top to bottom and back again’ is not just a title but a methodology — a way of transversing forms, of returning, of holding an active tension between rise and fall, persistence and erasure. The exhibition does not aim to deliver a univocal or spectacular statement, but rather to open up a space of perception, of slow reading, in which each work functions as a point of inflection. Between formal rigour and sensitive attention, between an economy of means and symbolic density, Louise Sartor’s work interrogates what makes an image today.

Curated by Oriane Durand

Louise Sartor, De haut en bas & back again
Società delle Api
Jul 4 – Sep 19, 2025
Monaco