A travers les platanes, Place st germain des pres - 2019 — Ink on Paper by Caroline Lopez

About This Artwork

Caroline Lopez trained as an interior architect and has never stopped drawing. Her practice moves between two modes: in Paris streets, she fills sketchbooks. Back in her studio, she mixes, overlays, and redraws those sketches. The result is a recomposed vision of the city, not a transcription. The "À travers les platanes" series applies this method to a recurring viewpoint: looking upward through plane tree canopies at different Paris locations. The choice of subject is deliberate. Lopez avoids the city's over-seen emblems. She focuses on what postcards ignore: the silent rooftops, the everyday facades, the details of actual Parisian life. The plane tree canopy is not a picturesque frame. It is the mechanism that redirects the eye toward the architecture behind and above — the Paris that exists below the level of the image. This work does so at the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés and is part of the Paris collection within the Mémoire Urbaine et Collective project.

The line in Lopez's work seeks to reveal rather than represent. In this drawing, the plane tree foliage appears as dense, flat black ink masses that occupy much of the composition. Pale channels run between them, tracing the branch structure and opening toward the sky. Through these openings, the Haussmannian rooftops emerge. Rooftop profiles, window arrangements, chimneys, and building volumes are drawn with the structural precision of an architect who understands how these elements are built. The ink is broad and bold in the foliage, fine and exacting in the architecture. The white of the paper works throughout as sky, light, and air.

The work measures thirty by thirty centimeters on paper and weighs approximately one hundred grams. It was created in 2019 at Caroline Lopez's Rue du Dragon studio in Paris and is currently available for acquisition. Certificate number: not recorded in the source data — please verify and update. The series_name field in the source node is empty; external catalog records confirm this work is part of the "À travers les platanes" series — please update accordingly.