Catherine Lebrun
We are immensely pleased to welcome back Italo-Brazilian artist Patricia Sartori at Subtile. Following her 2022 abstract and graphic series that left a lasting impression, Patricia returns with Evanescent Memories, a project of rare depth where the delicacy of the gesture meets the power of remembrance.
Born in Brazil and trained in Milan, Patricia Sartori embodies a fascinating dual culture. With 20 years of experience as a graphic designer for top luxury houses (Tom Ford, Chopard, Jil Sander, Maxalto), she has honed a sense of composition and material with absolute precision. Since moving to Brussels in 2015, she has dedicated herself entirely to painting, exploring unusual combinations of tools and mediums.
Evanescent Memories originates from a profound human experience: the artist’s sister’s three-month coma. Upon waking, the process of mental reconstruction revealed how memory manifests, fragments, and reorganizes itself over time. Memories emerge as partial reminiscences: fragments of life and familiar spaces, particularly the garden—a central site of both collective and intimate memory.
The works presented are part of a profound reflection on the unstable nature of memory. They function as visual strata, where certain areas appear more defined while others tend to fade away. This ebb and flow between appearance and disappearance evokes both the mechanisms of the unconscious mind and the cycles of the botanical world, marked by growth, transformation, and renewal.
Unlike photography, which freezes a precise moment in time, these paintings offer an open temporality. They do not document a specific second; instead, they translate states of memory, leaving the viewer space for personal interpretation and projection.
The choice of Dibond, an aluminum support, lends the works an appearance akin to printing while asserting a contemporary materiality. The contrast between the industrial coldness of the support and the organic dimension of the paint highlights the tension between permanence and fragility, memory and erasure.
Evanescent Memories thus stands as a reflection on memory as a living process, on intergenerational transmission, and on time as a structural element of the human experience. Oscillating between abstraction and evocation, this body of work belongs to a painting of feeling rather than representation. The organic, fragmented, and expanding forms appear as the vestiges of an interior landscape—a memorial nature, traversed by time, emotion, and transformation
Between abstraction and evocation, this work belongs to a painting of feeling rather than representation. The organic, fragmented, and expanding forms appear as the vestiges of an interior landscape—a memorial nature, traversed by time, emotion, and transformation.
The pictorial surface functions as a field of resonance: the gestures—at times incisive, at others suspended—deposit signs that do not describe the world but rather condense the experience of it. The botanical motifs, never literal, act as open, non-codified symbols, evoking growth, disappearance, the cycle of life, and the persistence of the living.
This painting dialogues with a contemporary romantic symbolism, where romanticism is no longer narrative but sensory, and where the symbol is not an illustration but a trace. Much like the late works of Cy Twombly, particularly The Four Seasons, the canvas articulates writing, gesture, and color to produce a floating temporality made of sudden emergences and reminiscences. The proximity to Joan Mitchell is manifest in the physical relationship to the paint, the chromatic intensity, and the way the landscape is transformed into an emotional space, traversed by memory and movement.
The work does not seek to freeze an image but to maintain a state—a continuous vibration between appearance and erasure. It invites the viewer into a contemplative experience, where the painting becomes a place for intimate projection, an open symbolic space, and something profoundly human.
Patricia Sartori’s talent is gaining significant recognition within the Brussels institutional art scene. She was recently selected from over 800 applicants to participate in “Hosting,” the prestigious inaugural exhibition at Centrale for Contemporary Art. Curated by the new Artistic Director Tania Nasielski to mark the center’s reopening, this large-scale “cabinet of curiosities” features 247 artists from Brussels and its periphery. By being part of this dynamic group show, Patricia’s work engages in a profound dialogue with themes of ecology and cycles of renewal, solidifying her position as a vital voice in Brussels’ contemporary art landscape.
