Artist Louise Sartor Paints her Friends in the Season’s Top Fashion
For W’s Art Issue, the Paris-based painter captured her creative peers in looks that complement their personalities.
“I have a fascination with these people that’s a little like being in love,” says Louise Sartor of the subjects she chose for the portraits you see here. W asked the French artist to depict creative peers wearing fashion from the latest collections. Sartor started out by photographing them, then fused full-frame and detail shots into compositions that she completed in her live-work studio.
This was the first time Sartor shot so many subjects in a single day, and the first time she used a stylist. “Normally, I paint people in their own clothes, but this was a little like playing with dolls,” she says. She explains that when she knows her sitters well, she develops a “multiple vision of them” and is tempted to make them overly pretty, loading up the painting with too much.
Her antidote to that kind of sentimentality is usually a quick dip into the work of other artists—depending on the model and what they inspire in her, it might be Francis Bacon, Henry Taylor, Ingres, Vuillard, Balthus, or the pre-Raphaelites. Alice Neel and Elizabeth Peyton were top of mind when she created this series.
Sartor is also known for her still lifes and landscapes, including an ongoing series of the view of the sky from her studio window. She usually works on found cardboard, postcards, or discarded paper rather than canvas. “I’m more comfortable with something that’s not so precious,” she explains. The idea of detritus recurs in her paintings of dead animals, flowers, and rotten fruit. “Every time I find a dead animal, I bring it home and paint it,” Sartor says of her memento mori, “but you have to be fast because they get smelly after a few days.” She is currently exhibiting decaying flower paintings at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles.
Sartor, 37, initially wanted to become a printmaker and then a stage designer, but found her way to painting while getting her degree at the École des Beaux-Arts. “I did only black and white for so long,” she recalls. “When you’re young in France, you’re very intellectual and you like dark things.” Now her output is striking for its vibrant color, which heightens the undercurrent of tension in her figures.
Sartor says the solitude of her work can be a challenge, which is why she engages in collaborative ventures like the Treignac Projet, a curatorial residency in a tiny village in the mountainous central region of Corrèze. There, she and the painter Matthieu Palud, working together under the name Cocotte, assembled a series of exhibitions in a former boutique over the course of three years. Cocotte also spearheads a sticker collective: They invite writers, musicians, and other artists they admire, such as Joshua Abelow and Isabelle Cornaro, to submit designs, which they reproduce and sell at cost. It provides a lo-fi and easy way for anyone to connect with art. “People like stickers,” Sartor says.
Anna Frera
Frera wears a Louis Vuitton jacket and boots.
“You could say Louise’s work is atemporal, but there’s really the whole history of art in it,” says Anna Frera, a curator and art consultant. Frera has modeled before, “but I’m not very photogenic,” she says. “I’m too expressive. Louise really put me at ease.”
Martine Bedin
Bedin wears an Hermès jacket, top, and shoes; Loulou de Saison pants; Charlotte Chesnais earrings; Juliette Polac necklace.
Martine Bedin, one of the cofounders of the Memphis design group, was a collaborator and friend of the late filmmaker Claude Eveno, Sartor’s father. “There’s something in her portraits that’s very intellectual and uninhibited,” Bedin says. “She is like a magnificent animal, wild and terribly determined.”
Nadia Moussa
Moussa wears a Chanel dress; Celine boots.
“This was the first time I posed for a painter,” says Nadia Moussa, an actor. “It was a really intimate moment. We talked about our lives and loves and sang Celine Dion’s ‘Pour Que Tu M’Aimes Encore.’”
Philippe Hallais
Hallais wears a Bluemarble tunic and boots; Undercover T-shirt; C.R.E.O.L.E shorts.
Philippe Hallais, an electronic-music composer also known as Low Jack, was struck by the attention Sartor paid to his hands and neck when she took the initial photographs. “She’s very intentional with detail,” he says.
Mona Varichon
Varichon wears an Alaïa bodysuit and skirt; Gucci earrings; Emilio Cavallini tights; Valentino Garavani sandals.
“I like making portraits too, and it’s great to find models who are relaxed and know what’s needed,” says Mona Varichon, a mixed-media artist. “You can’t move too much or talk. Often, when someone’s nervous, they talk a lot, but it makes for an ugly expression in a portrait.”
Artwork photographed by Alex Kostromin. Fashion Assistants: Marie Poulmarch, Glorija Gzimailaite. Artworks Courtesy of Louise Sartor and Crèvecœur, Paris.
