Sandrine Stoïanov

A former student of the Beaux-Arts d'Épinal and Reims, where she studied conceptual art, Sandrine Stoïanov trained in cartooning on the job after a spell at Gobelins l'école de l'image. She has co-directed two short animated films with writer-director Jean-Charles Finck that are very personal to her: Irinka & Sandrinka (2006) and Le Monde en Soi (2020), nominated for a César in 2022.

For the latter, the script demanded that she return to her first love of painting and tackle a technique she had never practised before: oil painting. It was a turning point. With the help of isolation and time in confinement, she very quickly found, over and above well-digested influences, her own touch, a personal gesture, her 'way'... which she has been expressing in her canvases ever since. So, almost incidentally, she became a painter. Like the character in her film (who already looked a lot like her). Life imitates art.Her artistic approach is to give faces to the cultural mix of urban society. To take the 'long time' required by the technique of oil painting and the patient observation of his contemporaries, to reveal what they simulate and what they mask, in the manner of a Degas, a Lautrec, or perhaps a Hopper, thus rediscovering the light of a social naturalism, but of today. Painting human beings caught up in the modernity of their attachments, their contradictions and aspirations, the weight of their daily lives, and thus creating portraits of people we are not used to seeing represented in this light, particularly women. Little by little, she built up her body of work.