Comme chez toi !

To many, this canonical subject of commissioned art — these interiors shielded from the urgency of the world — may seem distant.
And yet, in these paintings, there is something beneath the surface. Or rather, right against it.

In these unstable perspectives, these accumulated objects, these flat planes that hint at spaces whose scale seems to tower over us: the canvases of Like Home, while depicting interiors, are perhaps just as much self-portraits.
Negative self-portraits of the artist at work, solitary, as he moves through these apartments, catching glimpses of their opulence.

Louis Granet is a painter; he exhibits in galleries and sells his works to collectors.
It is his profession.
For him, collectors’ apartments are, first and foremost, a workspace.
The place where Louis meets those who allow him to make a living from his craft, where he hangs the sold paintings.

It is also a space for projections and questions about the proximity he maintains, through his practice, to these worlds and his own aspirations.
Like Home thus operates on a dual level of interpretation.

His paintings can be seen as a continuation of the tradition of commissioned art, providing the painter with a referential field as both playground and legitimacy.
This legitimacy is reinforced by his use, for the first time in his work, of oil paint, which lends a sense of historicity and depth.

They can also be seen as the expression of a generation that can no longer separate the subject of a work from its context of production: a situated voice, and thus, the testimony of the contemporary condition of the visual artist.

Something is perhaps at play here in Louis Granet’s practice, drawing a parallel to the debate that opposed Pop Art and Narrative Figuration in the 1960s.
That is: can we represent reality while ignoring its injustices, without seeking to provoke indignation?
It seems to me that Louis Granet, rather than opposing these positions, seeks to make them coexist.

Louis Granet belongs to a generation that believes we can no longer view creation as a demiurgic act, that today creating works is no longer a blank check for indifference,
that today we say art workers rather than simply Artist with an indulgent capital A.

In the reverse shot of these canvases, amidst the opulence of these grand walls, bouquets, and handbags, we imagine Louis, alone, torn between convictions he may share, and the urgency to take a stance — in any case, as much as the honesty of embracing the fascination exerted on him by beauty and comfort, possible rewards of a practice pursued daily in the studio.

The honesty of this ambivalence is reinforced, in each of the paintings in this series, by the presence of explicit references to the painters who have influenced Louis Granet’s practice.
The works of Shirley Jaffe, Hervé Télémaque, Ida Ekblad, among others, dot the walls of these fantasized apartments, to the point of infusing the very materiality of the painted scene.
They are as much status symbols, symbols of exclusivity, as they are tutelary figures to whom Louis Granet pays homage, whose abundance testifies to the artist’s devotion to his painting practice and what he owes to it.

These references also testify, finally, to the influence of abstraction — a genre to which many of these referenced artists belong — on Louis Granet’s work.
Is it not visible elsewhere in this seemingly figurative series?
Perhaps in the very structure of these paintings. Fantasies as much as landscapes, representations as much as mental spaces, they testify to the possibility for painting to make perceptible, through abstraction, « this invisible life that we are ».

And the collector’s apartment, with its grand volumes, vast walls, vases, and master paintings, has become an unveiling, a confession held in suspense.

Comme chez toi !