Paris by Guillaume Chansarel

In his work, French artist Guillaume Chansarel turns the city of Paris into more than just a backdrop—he treats it as a recurring subject, a living narrative that he revisits from many viewpoints. Based in France, Chansarel draws on his deep familiarity with Paris to depict the metropolis in a rich succession of angles and moods. By varying the moments—morning light, dusk, artificial glow of night—and the viewpoints—from the pedestrian level to elevated vantage points—he captures not just one face of Paris but its many faces: melancholic, busy, luminous, or intimate.

What makes Chansarel’s representation of Paris distinctive is not simply that he paints the city, but how he does so. The originality of his work also derives from his use of books as a raw material for his paintings. This reuse of printed-pages gives his urban canvases a hybrid quality: built from the layering of old text, image and paint, they evoke both the archival weight of history and the immediacy of the present. Compared to many cityscape painters who focus purely on surface appearance, Chansarel’s approach adds a meta-layer: Paris is seen through the lens of architectural form and the palimpsest of time, as though each building, each street holds layered stories. In doing so he avoids simply repeating the well-worn iconic images of Paris, and instead offers fresh, often less-expected viewpoints, filtering them through his own vision so the familiar becomes subtly new.