Gallery Elsa Meunier, (Dans les yeux d’Elsa), and Gallery Mathilde Le Coz are delighted to present ‘The Things We Talk About’, the third solo exhibition by French artist Louise Janet. For this exhibition, a dozen paintings and drawings have been created especially for the occasion.

Louise Janet's world is a purely emotional one: a brooding sister and confidant friend on a bed, flatmates conversing in a kitchen, grandparents hypnotised by their television set, a home at night. In these scenes, the artist is never far away, her shadow sometimes appearing, like the silhouette of Vivian Maier, a discreet but ever-present witness. As in the accordion of folds in her leporello, where Kiki the cuddly toy, a slice of birthday cake, an art library and a self-portrait stand side by side, Louise Janet's paintings are the boxes of a life to be leafed through. The vignettes of a comic strip that is tender, cruel and funny, just like the Tom-Tom and Nana albums. Depicted in two panels, Ivry-sur-Seine is as colourful as Springfield in The Simpsons. Montreuil has the flavour of Taniguchi's Quartiers lointains. The artist's gaze is omniscient, like that of Chris Ware. It crosses the partitions that separate individuals, abolishing distance to reveal a shared intimacy. Far from the monofocal perspective theorised by Alberti, her eye wanders without hierarchy, as in a Persian miniature, weaving a more sensory and empathetic relationship with her subjects. Under her pencils, then her brushes, nothing escapes her: the layout of a room, the colourful pattern of a quilt, the detail of a tattoo. Beneath the apparent tenderness of her scenes, an urban chronicle emerges, made up of dim lights, windows lit late at night, ordinary moments. A chronicle inhabited by those who live there, waiting, together but alone, in these ever-changing suburbs. The gentle melancholy of Charlie Brown's strips or Raymond Carver's short stories. As with the American writer, Louise Janet's scenes hold their secrets. Feelings, tensions and tenderness pass silently by, slipped into a restrained gesture, a light in an empty room. These paintings, like her unfinished dialogues, tell of what is not said, what is there, lurking, sometimes invisible but always latent: love, solitude, the fragility of relationships... Louise Janet delivers a sensitive portrait of our times, in which the small scenes scenes of private life, with a vuillardian atmosphere, open onto a fragmented city, the receptacle of our shared solitudes. In this tender, restless painting, there is a lucidity without cynicism, a way of observing life as one would look at an interior scene: with particular attention to what, in the décor, speaks softly what words keep silent.

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Enzo Menuge