Louise Sartor: De haut en bas & back again

Curated by Oriane Durand

Louise Sartor’s solo exhibition at La Società delle Api brings together a series of paintings and drawings made 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: the cypress tree and the bouquet of withered flowers. Beneath these realistically rendered images borrowing from a classical style, the choice of medium and the juxtaposition of two vegetal states—one persistent, the other in decline—articulate a reflection on the temporalities of living things, cycles of transformation, and how images come into being.

Cardboard packaging as pictorial support is an essential entry point into Sartor’s practice. A humble material from the consumer chain, it signals both an aesthetic and political positioning: to paint on cardboard is to reject traditional material hierarchy while suggesting a closeness to the ordinary. It introduces instability, precarity, and familiarity, pointing to creative possibilities using accessible means. The asymmetrical and singular pieces she paints on echo strategies by artists like Thomas Hirschhorn or Richard Tuttle, for whom cardboard is a fragile, seemingly worthless support. This inversion opens a critical space: What is produced in the act of painting? What is given value? What is represented, and on what ground?

Multiplied across these chosen surfaces, the cypress motif performs its own symbolic inversion. Associated with cemeteries and mourning, the cypress is also evergreen, emblematic of longevity. Van Gogh described it as a tree that “connects the earth and the sky.” Sartor revisits this cosmic dimension through repetition and verticality, producing momentum that seems to defy entropy. It is not the tree that changes, but its surroundings—light, sky, nearby foliage—revealing a vitality that transcends the modest support.

In contrast to this upward dynamic, the wilted flowers evoke a silent, pious mood. Rooted in the vanitas tradition, they suggest transience and the finitude of existence. Captured in their terminal phase, these bouquets retain a subtle presence. Sartor’s painterly precision reveals the tipping point between brilliance and demise. Fragile stems rendered in nervous lines express residual energy; leaves undulate like streamers prolonging life in a final ballet.

If the cypress embodies persistence and ascent, the wilted flower conveys a downward, intimate motion. The exhibition’s title—De haut en bas & back again—proposes a cyclical, non-linear reading. Life and death are not opposites but intertwined states, replayed in the act of painting.

Louise Sartor also reflects on the image and its reproducibility. Her use of seriality—in motif and format—places her within a lineage from Warhol to conceptual artists of the 1970s. The exhibition title nods to Warhol’s From A to B and Back Again (1975), where repetition becomes a mode of thought. Here, it is not redundancy but variation: shifting attention, revealing nuance, and expanding temporality. Each image is a moment in a process, not a fixed object.

A series of digital drawings complements the works on cardboard. Presented as a slideshow on a screen, they weave a narrative both personal and imaginary. Older works reappear, blurring chronology. The digital medium extends Sartor’s inquiry into circulation, reproducibility, and the instability of images. Fragments and disjointed temporalities coexist, layering visual strata. Even on cardboard, the painted image enters this network—sometimes in resistance.

What remains central in Sartor’s work is a gaze turned toward elementary forms—a tree, a flower, a vase—not to extract their essence, but to recast their presence under contemporary material and symbolic conditions. From top to bottom and back again is not just a title but a method: a way of holding tension between rise and fall, persistence and erasure. The exhibition opens a space of perception, where each work marks a point of inflection. Between rigour and sensitivity, Sartor’s work interrogates what makes an image today.

Text : Oriane Durand
Translation : Douglas Boatwright