Bruno Sari

Bruno Sari belongs to a singular lineage. His great-grandfather, Léon Sari (1824–1890), born at the Château de Prangins, where Joseph Bonaparte lived in exile, ran several Parisian theatres, among them the Folies-Bergère in the years following 1870.

His grandfather, the painter Arsène Sari (1895–1995), co-founded the Salon des Vrais Indépendants in 1928 and lived for more than thirty years in Montparnasse before settling in Provence. For the Saris, painting is a matter of family and of the stage.

Bruno Sari taught himself to paint. In the late 1980s, he created original works for the Parisian florist Au nom de la rose, where he exhibited his “Roses d’encre”. In the early 2000s, his work was shown at Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in Poissy, and then at the Maternité des Bluets.

In October 2002, at the Art et Littérature bookshop on the boulevard du Montparnasse, he painted live in ink while a pianist played Ravel. Painting in response to music, a voice or a text would become a constant throughout his career.

A graduate of the Institut National d’Expression, de Création, d’Art et de Thérapie (INECAT), from 2004 he led “Dessin-Dialogue” workshops for people living with Alzheimer’s disease. Drawing there is not an activity: it is a way of conversing when words fail.

Two books grew out of this experience: La vie enfouie (Fleurus, 2011), with the psychiatrist Patrick Dewavrin, which brings together paintings made in his workshop, and Concevoir et accompagner une médiation artistique avec des personnes âgées (Chronique Sociale), with Marie Le Bihan. In 2024, he extended these workshops into an intergenerational format, with Les Petits Frères des Pauvres and the Fondation Abuela.

In 2018, a volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, opened by chance, set off a series that would occupy him for several years. With the writer Jean Ferrière, he produced a first suite of forty drawings. There followed a Proustian day at the Château de Maintenon (2019), the exhibition “Marcel Proust, l’aventure littéraire” at the Grand Balcon in Cabourg (2020), and then at the Hôtel de Ville in Trouville-sur-Mer (2021).

In 2022, at the Gare de Houlgate, “Le jardin des roses” paid tribute to the florist from whom Proust bought his bouquets: an echo of his own beginnings with a Parisian florist. That same year, with the actress Christine Sireyzol, he created the performance “Peinture-Lecture”.

During the 2020 lockdown, he made eleven films with Marion Maret, “À la lumière du temps présent”, and set out to illustrate the eighteen novels of Maurice Leblanc. “Le Monde d’Arsène Lupin” was exhibited in Maintenon in 2021 and gathered in the book Arsène Lupin en peinture. Another book, Toulouse-Lautrec de Paris à Villeneuve, continues this dialogue between painting and art history.

Now settled in Maintenon, he published Paris, Paris, Paris (2019), an illustrated autobiographical narrative, under the Dessins-dialogues éditions imprint. In September 2023, the exhibition “Maintenon insolite”, held in the town hall garden, accompanied the book of the same name: inks and watercolours of a town observed at close quarters.

Since 2025, Bruno Sari has painted with very long, very supple brushes, deliberately hard to control, on densely grained paper. The first gesture produces a surprise within a defined space, and the painting is built from it. He cites Pierre Alechinsky among his influences and sums up his approach thus: “The driving force of painting lies precisely in this ever-renewed surprise.”

The works gathered in the catalogue, painted in 2025 and 2026, are inks and acrylics on paper mounted on canvas. Among them are painted frames, discs, imprints and figures emerging from a stain. In the Dîner en ville series, the circular packaging of a Japanese meal becomes a stamp; in the diptychs and the triptych dedicated to his friend Isabelle, the painting responds to a video of an African dancer.