Opening of Voeux by Louise Sartor and Le Monde à l’envers III by Sarah Benslimane
On Tuesday, June 30th, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., the Fondation Pernod Ricard will inaugurate the site-specific works by artists Louise Sartor and Sarah Benslimane. Entitled Voeux (2026) and Le Monde à l’envers III (2026), the artists’ monumental canvases will be on display for two years, installed respectively on the building across from the Foundation and on the entrance pediment.
Louise Sartor, Voeux (2026)
A monumental work installed on the building across from the Fondation Pernod Ricard, Louise Sartor’s Voeux (2026) expresses the sometimes contradictory feelings evoked by the current state of the world. Every day, a cascade of news stories, each more alarming than the last, paralyzes our reasoning and critical thinking, keeping us in a state of constant shock. The climate of doubt surrounding the very notion of truth, and the erosion of relative peace among nations, is intensely anxiety-inducing. The sheets of newspaper evoke this daily onslaught of terrifying news and the troubling state of information processing. But their origami folding references a symbol of peace: according to a Japanese legend, folding a thousand paper cranes by hand would grant one’s wish. This tradition continues today at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, where thousands of votive cranes for peace from around the world are placed each year.
Art Wall is an arts patronage program that displays a monumental artwork for two years in front of Pernod Ricard’s global headquarters in Paris, chosen by the group’s employees from a selection proposed by the Foundation. Louise Sartor’s work succeeds Carlotta Bailly Borg’s Cloudy (2022).
Sarah Benslimane, Le Monde à l’envers III (2026)
Le Monde à l’envers (&e World Upside Down, 2025) utilizes rolls of wallpaper printed with a digitally rendered motif of Earth seen from space. Within each of five horizontal strips stacked on top of each other, the contours of the continents and the borders between countries have been redrawn, cut and remodeled, coldly. The brutality and drama of such a gesture are compounded by the fact that the earth is pictured at night, and speckled with bright red glass beads, that might as well be fires, large enough to be seen from the stratosphere. &is is a picture of interstellar warfare, albeit one seen on the walls of a cheap nail salon or a provincial mall, where one would expect to find such tacky wallpaper. The beads also recall the little red dots on the maps that accompany explanatory wall texts in a historical museum, while small crime scene markers scattered on the entire surface of the painting remind us that the planetary violence it intimates is as mundane as can be. These are works that, literally, reach for the sky. The shifing of the scale of the terror that pullulates in our very cells to a cosmological high ground and back disenchants the world.
Excerpt from an essay by Fabrice Stroun published in the MAMCO Journal No. 15 in 2025 regarding an earlier version of the work, first exhibited at the Galerie Francesca Pia (CH) and then at 19M (FR) in 2025. As a constantly evolving project, the motif of the work Le Monde à l’envers unfolds in multiple variations.
Fully integrated into the architecture, the entrance pediment of the Pernod Ricard Foundation allows an artist to hang a canvas there for a period of two years. Each artist then designates the person who will take their place. Sarah Benslimane’s work succeeds TEMPLATE (2024) by Nicolas Chardon.
The opening, originally scheduled for Wednesday, May 20, has been postponed due to uncertain weather conditions that would prevent the safe installation of the canvases.
