Matthieu Palud and Louise Sartor at PAGE (NYC)

Artists: Matthieu Palud and Louise Sartor

Venue: PAGE (NYC), New York, US

Date: January 21 – March 5, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Page, New York

Louise and Matthieu, the artist couple from France, take divergent and complementary approaches in contemplating and recompiling the still life as an object of time from beginning to end. The arrangement of flowers is both obvious and groundbreaking as a place of seeing and foundational inception. The two artists are pulling the threads of the same specimens from opposing directions.

Louise’s beautifully abandoned arrangements spiral slowly into decay as delicate helices take form—from this corrosion comes a newfound order. Louise sublimates her flowers onto supermarket cargo, bending negative space into clever abstract forms that feel surprisingly psychedelic once fully absorbed. Louise finds splendor and new paths

in the decadent, as her wilting subjects capture the wearing of time rather than the pleasure of its renewal.

For Matthieu, the entropy has fully subsided. Out of elemental structures comes a dreamy painterly language powered by bright LEDs and scientific-grade bendy straws. Matthieu’s subjects are fundamental and cellular, given a cool freaky bent programmed into its RNA and processed with a smooth and aloof sharpness. These floral prototypes are constructed with mostly straight rulers according to a unique mystical geometry not yet taught in schools.