Although Louise Janet has always loved drawing her family, friends, and the city she enjoys wandering through, it was only later, during her studies at the Beaux-Arts de Paris (first in François Boisrond’s studio, then in Mimosa Echard’s), that she began to explore painting. Not to create larger works, but to develop a practice just as meticulous, rich, and concentrated. In her pocket-sized formats, some small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, space unfolds in narrow depths; reflections glide across mirrors; books and objects pile up under the artificial glow of lamps. Amidst the clutter, silent figures wait for time to pass, absorbed in their screens or in the reading of a book.
One never paints alone, as the saying goes. Among the artists who inspire her, the young painter often cites David Hockney, whose work she discovered in all its scope, and the way it has been built like a visual diary, offering viewers a position both detached and voyeuristic, during his 2017 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. She also acknowledges the influence of Dutch genre painting, Vermeer in particular, for his precision, his framing of the subject, his use of thresholds to guide the gaze, and his tender attention to interior stillness and solitude. But one is not only accompanied by painters. Before them, Louise Janet owes much to literature and cinema. With Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, among others, she shares the obsession with holding onto time, with recording memory in its tiniest details. From the films of the French New Wave, especially Agnès Varda and Éric Rohmer, she borrows the silences, as expressive as dialogue, and that unjudging gaze cast upon reality. And not least, the influence of comics, which appear as motifs in many of her paintings, but from which she borrows above all the dual rhythm of reading: first, the page as a whole, scanned in a single glance; then, the narrative that unfolds frame by frame, detail by detail.
From there arise several questions that run through Louise Janet’s work, some common to all fields of creation, others particular to painting itself: Can one truly describe every aspect of a scene, of a memory? How can one tell a story in a single, fixed image? How can one introduce the notion of time into it? And how, without words, can one let the inner state of the subjects emerge?
How? By scattering clues, opening abstract and symbolic spaces, creating a subtle permeability between human figures and their surroundings, through the choice of tones, colors, and lights; by lending a touch of melancholy to the landscape; by manipulating reality so that the trivial becomes meaningful. For it must be understood that the apparent spontaneity of Louise Janet’s canvases is never uncalculated. Her awkward disorder is a trap, her anecdotal quality a ruse, a polite way of pretending to speak of nothing too serious, only to better conceal the commentary she offers on our condition.
Voyeurs, but not intruders, we are allowed to enter, without trespassing, the intimacy of others who are unknown to us and yet resemble us, not through cynicism or irony, but rather with the tenderness due to those who share, silently and like us, the same existential solitude. The same longing to escape it, too, the same yearning for other worlds, other fictions.