Ernesto Sartori

Ernesto Sartori has always conducted his sculpture experiments with a paint brush in hand to revisit form differently — certainly in a more fluid way. He is a painter who uses volumes for his painting needs. Similarly to Uccello, who would build wooden horses to get a better picture of the physical reality of the Battle of San Romano, one could approach Ernesto Sartori's installations as life-size experiments for pictorial compositions that go beyond the model since they do not disappear to give way to painting. The paintings move the sculptures in different spaces and contexts, which are most often imaginary. The science-fiction narrative has always been for him a model for understanding art and the necessity to question simultaneously various realities and thus various media. Ten years later, this interpretation is refuted by the greater autonomy of his painting. The latter has thickened while the volumes are no longer raised as high above the ground, preferring instead to spread as ‘‘fragments’’ that are smaller, consisting of pieces of fabric, of recognisable objects, of supplies, and bits of materials. These installations appear to serve painting, as palettes available to the subtle colourist that he is. It is wonderful to observe what could be called the freedom of the painter: a way of exhibiting his work without expecting any form of museumification of his tools (here, they are tool-artworks) materialising all that comes before and the origins of what we are looking at. Sartori regularly revisits classic themes, such as still life or landscape painting, without separating them. We rediscover everyday objects under the open sky. All the earth has to do is absorb them, but it will likely take longer than the very life of the painting. His paintings and installations are archeological events, situations that are closer to life — and to its broken springs — than to an ideal image. The painting is not merely a lie. It also has the frankness of not suspending time or entangling it. Ernesto’s painting shows us objects that the earth can spit out at any time, solitary things that have nothing to do with the shiny fruits of ancient myths. These objects do not flatter anything, they are in the way. And yet, Ernesto makes them funny and touching like the Harlequin costume. He organises and creates colour gradients in his installations, he dissolves objects within his paintings, like this piano that is invisible when looking at it closely and yet well present — a sheet of paper placed on its lid and about to fall on the floor. As we stare — in a blurry state of mind — at the things that are before us, it is sometimes possible to see particles, a light rain shower beating down, in an unreal way, on what surrounds us. Painting is thus something that is both dead and alive, which tenses up our eyes, makes our vision more powerful, whilst participating in the fall and the birth of worlds. ...

We founded Marcelle Alix in 2009 in Paris and settled in a characteristic, early 20th-century boutique in Belleville. The gallery is for us a creative space, where the dialog with artists is not only meant to selling artworks, but is also based on an equal relationship to creativity. We now represents thirteen artists and two duos. Our identity has been built with the support of the artists who opened our programme (Aurélien Froment, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Charlotte Moth, Ernesto Sartori, Marie Voignier) and those we introduced to the French art scene (Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Ian Kiaer, Donna Gottschalk). During these years, we have supported broad artistic careers (Laura Lamiel, Liz Magor and Mira Schor whose work we represent exclusively in Europe) and accompanied the development of new perspectives in sculpture (Gyan Panchal, Jean-Charles de Quillacq) in video (Lola Gonzàlez), and in drawing (Armineh Negahdari). Our gallery has been a pioneer in defining a space for queer art in France : in addition to showing her work within the artist duo Boudry/Lorenz since 2011, we have directed the translation into French of Renate Lorenz's 2012 seminal book, « Queer Art » in 2018. Since 2019, we have exhibited photographs by Donna Gottschalk documenting the lives of women living with women who were involved in the lesbian movement in the United States in the 1970s. In 2023 we organised an exhibition for the Utopi.e award—first award in France for Lgbtqi+ art—for which we have invited Paris galleries Air de Paris and Sultana as fellow participants. We insist on the central role of a gallery in the ecosystem of art as a place to make idiosyncratic positions visible and weave a critical narrative around the most contemporary visual forms. ...