Global Inversion Inversion

They are there every night, every day, but we never see them. The security guards at the Palais de Tokyo watch over the artworks while visitors walk past them without looking. Lassana Sarre, painter and portraitist, has chosen to give them back the gaze that is denied them. The approach is simple, almost obvious, but it is its obviousness that is striking.

Sarre immerses himself in the places he depicts, shares the daily lives of those he paints, observes the night rounds, the measured steps, the solitary or shared meals in the changing rooms. From these patient observations are born large-format acrylic paintings, of a formal tenderness that never veers into documentary. Never separate the cherries, Run to be curious, King Rider, Frantz Fanon, Engraving in Time… The titles themselves resist the fixing of a single meaning, as if the artist wanted to leave his models the possibility of slipping away at the very moment he shows them. “With a single brushstroke,” the artist writes, “art can make appear and disappear at the same time.”

The sentence sums up the program: a painter who, by making the invisible visible, does not thereby assign them – on the contrary, he invites them to a free presence. At a time when museums are questioning what they show and what they conceal, Sarre offers a rare answer: start by looking at those who guard the walls.

PALAIS DE TOKYO
From June 5 to September 13, 2026
13 avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 - Metro Iéna (9)
Wed. to Mon. 12pm-10pm, Thu. until midnight
Closed Tue.
Price: €13 - Reduced price: €9 - Free for under 18s