Artist corner

Max Trutt is the artistic alias of Maxim Trudolubov, a writer and journalist. While Trudolubov explores social issues through books and essays, Trutt adopts a ground-level perspective, using animal imagery to highlight creatures that have long been seen as prey, sources of fear, or objects of fascination.
Humans have always sought to prove their uniqueness, often believing that qualities like soul, mind, or consciousness set them apart from other life forms. This blurry divide between humans and animals opens up a dialogue about power and hierarchy—the rulers and the ruled, the strong and the weak, the 'us' and 'them.' Since prehistoric times, animals have represented the 'Other,' embodying humanity’s dependence on and reverence for nature. 
Animals have always accompanied people in their attempts to understand themselves—figures to flee from, chase, or compare with. As an artist, Trutt embraces the language of allegories and fables. Unlike the direct speech of those protected by power or status, fables have traditionally been the voice of the vulnerable, offering a way to critique power and social norms without direct confrontation.

Desirèe Apicella is an illustrator, graphic designer, and photographer originally from Cairo Montenotte.
She graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin with a thesis on artists' autobiographies in modern and contemporary art, then continued her studies in illustration and graphic design through specialization courses and as a self-taught.
Today she works with various media, including manual and digital illustration, photography, and video making, to capture the essence of places and objects and visually represent reality and moods through her sensitivity.

Demelza Kooij is a filmmaker, visual artist, and researcher born in The Netherlands, now based in Scotland. Her practice and research interests relate to depicting Other worlds: interactions between animals, ecologies of the sea, land, sky and exchanges in-between; the hidden beauty in everyday life, and women’s histories.
Highlights are winning the Jury Prize at Ann Arbor Film Festival for Wolves From Above, and screenings at e.g. Festival Du Nouveau Cinéma Montréal, Full Frame, Hamptons IFF, Edinburgh IFF, as well as exhibiting at WRO Media Art Biennale Poland, Finnish Museum of Photography Helsinki, FACT Liverpool, and The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul [MMCA].
She completed a PhD in Film Production: Empathising with Animals: Non-Human Subjectivity in Documentary Film. Additionally, she has a background in Philosophy (MA) and Archaeology (BA Hons), which remain relevant to her practice.
During the residency at Il Gattopardo, Demelza will explore the role of place and happenstance in art-making and storytelling. Beginning with walking as a point of departure, she engages with her surroundings through drawing, painting, sculpture, video, photography, and writing, which will culminate in an installation.

Equal parts melancholy and comforting, Charlie Boï’s music is the kind you put on for a long road trip or curl up with under the covers on a rainy day.
With her warm, hushed voice and smooth guitar work, she crafts a soothing blend of French-English folk, drawing inspiration from artists like Billie Marten, Cat Power, and Laura Marling. On stage, her intimate sound and infectious melodies wrap her audience in a timeless cocoon.
After a first chapter in cinema and years of composing in secret, Charlie Boï hit the Parisian scene before taking her music global on a journey through New Orleans and Nashville in 2022, where she met Kit Thorn—who would go on to produce her debut U.S. concert two years later.
This journey confirmed her desire to fully commit to folk music and lead to Charlie Boï's debut EP, “Superstition Hypochondria”, that she released on January 31st 2025.
Deeply tied to a personal journey of resilience, it stems from the therapeutic power that music has held in her life — becoming a space for expression, healing, and connection.

Line Bourdoiseau is an artist specialized in public, ecological and participatory art, with an approach based on the use of natural and recycled materials.
Graduated from the Fine Arts of Bordeaux and Nantes, she deepened her practice at the National School of La Cambre, with a specialization in public art.
Over the course of her journey, she has developed an abstract sculpture that unfolds outside conventional formats and dialogues directly with the context in which it is inscribed.
She had the opportunity to carry out many installations, ephemeral and perennial, in France and abroad.
Her associative commitment, especially in volunteering in connection with permaculture, nourishes her practice and strengthens her link with nature and ecological issues.
At the same time, she is constantly trained in the knowledge related to dyeing plants and woodworking through various training courses.
It is essential for her to relearn old knowledge and techniques and to learn how to create while respecting nature.
Her commitment to public space truly took shape during the Demonstrations in Nantes, a key moment when she became aware of the potential role of the artist in the reappropriation of common spaces.

Lisa Röing Baer (*1994, Sweden) delves into the contradictions and nuances of human existence in the 21st century. Through photography and objects, she records and examines the transient: things and structures which are subject to change or on the brink of disappearance.

Her practice largely consists of two areas. Firstly, analog photography. That technology, like many of her motifs, is the remnant of a bygone era. She continuously works on individual images that make up her archive. She engages deeply with the language of photography but also goes beyond it:

For exhibitions, she creates objects and installations. In addition to her own photographs, she uses commercially printed matter and other materials. She places particular attention on the periphery: the margins of what is being regarded are just as important as its centre. Formally, this results in a strong attention on framing.

Roya Soraya, born in Hanover in 1996, is a German illustrator and comic author. Her debut, the graphic novel "Faust - eine Tragödie!", was published in Germany in 2022. Created as a final project at the Folkwang University of the Arts, it retells Goethe's classic from a modern perspective.

Roya likes to tell her stories with a feminist attitude and focuses on the diversity and liveliness of her characters.

At Il Gattopardo, she has been working on an autobiographical graphic novel about a journey to her roots in Iran.

There's a blaze of light in every word," sings Leonard Cohen in Hallelujah.
Pauline Orta's songs, whether in French or Italian, let through the light that separates words and symbols, text and translation, language and music.
Pauline Orta is French and discovered Italian at the age of twelve. It was there that a real love affair with the language began, alongside a love affair with songs: the French songs of Barbara, Jacques Brel and Léo Ferré; the Italian songs of Fabrizio de Andrè, Gino Paoli and Paolo Conte; and the strange, esoteric pop songs of Battiato, Bjork and Leonard Cohen.
Listening to Pauline is like listening to a tribute, discovering a filiation and encountering at the same time a unique voice and pop and synthetic tunes. A unique blend of genres. It's also about grasping the link between symbols, notes and languages.

Pauline Orta

Alexiane Trapp (b. 1997 in Paris, France) is a visual artist who works with text. Graduated with
a Master’s Degree from the Beaux-arts in Bordeaux and with another Master’s Degree of
Création Littéraire in Le Havre.
Alexiane’s oral and written narratives are made up of interwoven stories based on personal
memories, myths, literary figures and characters from popular culture. Which questions
memory and transmission, about women sexualization or lies given to children for example,
to convey her contemporary point of view.
Since 2021, the artist has been staging her performances that combine texts and ceramics or
embroidery at various art spaces across France including the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers,
Ceramics Museum (Rouen), the Générateur (Gentilly), the LaM (Villeuneuve-d'Ascq), the Fine
Arts Museum (Rouen), the Niemeyer library (Le Havre), the BBB (Toulouse).

Born in 1996 in New-York, Anne Sarah Sanchez lives in Rouen, France. She graduated from
the Rouen Fine Art School in 2019 and has participated since in several residencies (L’H du
Siège, Valenciennes, L’Usine Utopik, Tessy-Bocage) and group shows (Le Shed – centre d’art
contemporain en Normandie).

“Large white volumes draw shapes in space, some recognizable, others enigmatic. Yet all are
drawn from reality. A reality that Anne Sarah Sanchez never ceases to observe, the better to
deconstruct and reconstruct it anew[...]. From architecture to furniture to objects, she sets out
to replicate certain elements using basic building materials - such as plaster, plasterboard,
wood, lime or polystyrene - which she chooses to leave in their raw state. During her
residency at Usine Utopik, the artist took a particular interest in the symbolic elements of
vernacular domestic architecture in Normandy. Under her hands, these are transformed into
sculptures whose features take on the appearance of surreal, ghostly scenery, succeeding in
disturbing the automatism of our perceptual reflexes. Anne Sarah Sanchez’s works offer the
punctuation of an immobile journey. A journey that evokes both the present and the immediate,
as well as the absent, vanished and evanescent.”
Licia Demuro independent curator and art critic, in charge of production at Palais de Tokyo
(2022)

Born in Lyon in 1998, Eliott Aubey graduated with a DNSEP in scenography from the Haute
École des Arts du Rhin in June 2024.
His artistic practice has been built around questions relating to the notion of
representation and its links to the creation of figurative - or disfiguring - spaces:
spaces constructed by a plastic and dramaturgical approach around elements marked by the
drawn gesture and the times it evokes.
Working on the times of creation of these figurations plunges us into the processes of
identification at work in each of us: to name them as processes is to give them the
possibility of metamorphosis.
His work was shown at the 5th PSSST! Festival in June 2024 (Strasbourg) and will be shown
at the ART/CORPS exhibition at Le Séchoir (Mulhouse) in September 2024.

Yves Bartlett is a performer, art coordinator, and publisher. Born in 1997, he lives and works between Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) and Mézin (Lot-et-Garonne).
Rooted in contemporary poetry, his research employs a humorous documentary methodology. In recent years, he has been particularly interested in the role of deception in our imaginations. He also explores linguistic issues, notably through Chinese and Italian languages, as well as forms of unwritten languages. His artistic practice is not necessarily about producing but rather about organizing, attempting to bring together creators and possibilities to facilitate the emergence of new forms of writing.

His practice is inherently collaborative, resulting in sound, literary, or graphic works, published by the association Distance Press, which he co-directs, or in collective performances. He is a member of the spoken-word duo Boogie(a) Woogie(b) and the free jazz group Traumpunkt. In the past, he co-founded the curatorial collective Folle Béton, the Fol Film Festival, and the Atelier Non-étoile. He has also been involved in the artistic direction of Espace Nonono (2023-2024), the festival La distance séparant l’œuf du sol (2020), Galerie Folle Béton (2018-2019), Galerie Nivet-Carzon (2018-2024), and the artist book festival Comme des lézards au soleil (2020-2022).

(*1997, Würzburg) Fabian Raphael Sokolowski lives and works in Düsseldorf. From 2017 to 2024, he studied Fine Arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Prof. Peter Piller and Painting with Prof. Maximiliane Baumgartner. Between 2022 and 2023, he attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen under Prof. Ferdinand Ahm Krag. In 2024, he completed his studies as a master student of Peter Piller. His works have been exhibited in solo and group shows, including GalleryQ (Copenhagen), Malkastenpark (Dusseldorf) and Sotheby’s (Cologne). Additionally, he works as a curator and theorist, focusing on responsibility in post-industrial modernity. He co-founded the academic journal for the sociology of art "Artis Observatio." His art explores image concepts related to macro-ecological and social issues based on an expanded concept of painting.

Florian Genzken (b. 1994) is a visual artist that studied Fine Arts in Munich, Paris and Vienna. His work questions the production and perception of images and text, mainly by using the mediums painting, photography and printmaking. Many of his works deal with transitions or translations and sometimes it’s just a minor mutilation that completely changes the message of an image or an object. Enlarging and multiplying what is meant to be small and unique, turning something inside out or signing images that are not his are formal ways of questioning the thing itself and its function and qualification as artwork. Disrupting expectations in a formal and conceptual way is the core of his work. Sometimes humor is the weapon of choice, sometimes it’s bold minimalism and at times it’s even laziness that gives the thought a form.

Paul Garcin graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire in 2019. He lives and works in Aubervilliers. His work has been shown at Point Éphémère during the Superflash and Jerk Off festivals, at the Villa Savoye in Poissy for Nuit Blanche 2024, at the TU-Nantes, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris for Felicita19, and at the Graineterie art center in Houilles, as part of the 13th Biennale de la Jeune Création in 2020.
He also mixes under the name joyful aries, and started a radio show « Main Character Energy », on Tikka in September 2024.

His practice is resolutely collaborative, and he is one of the founding members of KimPetrasPaintings, a variable-geometry collective with whom he is presenting his first exhibition GO FAR, GO HARD at Glassbox, the result of his summer 2021 residency at l'Estive. Subsequently, KPP will be invited to create an installation and workshop at the Palais de Tokyo in February 2023, and at ESACM in autumn 2022.