Louise Janet presents, one year after her graduation from Beaux-Arts de Paris, Building Stories, her second personal exhibition with a new body of oils on canvas which amplify and enhance her practice. The painter's gaze has become more refined, her little stories which she always deploys with lightness tell a bigger one: that of the lives of everyone in megacities in constant transformation. 

The artist who records with her brush the little things of everyday life, the one who crowns those around her with the proudly defended status of hero of the banal, the one who studs her canvases with fabrics, objects and images provides a wider frame to her interiors: the city. It enters through the window or a screen - versatile surfaces -, it exists by itself without a character, it is there moving, marked, often alone. 

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As the painter settles in Ivry-sur-Seine, it is a rapidly changing urbanity that she must understand: buildings like populations overlap and coexist without mixing. In his large oil on canvas Des histoires de la ville (Stories of the City) (2024), the artist shows a possible future city, on the computer screen: a video game city with more trees, more luminosity while outside the windows of a concrete low-rise are lit, in an Ivry that does not yet belong to the past.

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If one recognises in the artist her appetite for openings through her interiors loaded with screens, paintings, books or mirrors, the modules of the city (its windows, palisades, stones and balconies…) function as delimiting boxes, not far from those in comics. In each window, a new parallel story plays out. These modules act as a true parable of contemporary life compartmentalised with identical apartments where separated stories unfold, carried out side by side - they form our contemporary megacities. 

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An often unreal light bathes her interior and urban scenes. A cold blue-green emanates from computers, telephones, projectors, the characters are absorbed in front of these screens which capture all their attention. The screens are as much pretexts for painting as objects transporting her characters into a world that exists only for them, apart from the painting, apart from the city. A purple fog plunges Ivry-sur-Seine into a solitary and fictitious atmosphere, enveloping the city in a very contemporary spleen, that, perhaps, of being stuck between an irremediable future which advances too quickly and a past which we gives up without being prepared. Louise Janet gives a psychological presence to this city, also absorbed and pensive. 

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When her paintings are inhabited, it is her loved ones - grandparents, companion, brother - that Louise Janet represents with affection and distance. Only the world of childhood seems protected from the urban and pensive silence which reigns in her works. The artist integrates herself into her compositions, she too belongs to this city and her body fully inscribes her there: her legs, her feet and even her swollen face in the self-portrait Le Monstre (The Monster) (2024) - this is first and foremost through the body that a city is experienced.

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With this new exhibition, Louise Janet truly embodies a painting of her time, the content of her works goes beyond the limits of her frames to tell us the solitary beauty and doubt of urban stories. With Building Stories the artist poetically paints these little anecdotes that make up the life of big cities.