Snake is a painting by the contemporary French artist: Guillaume Chansarel. It is part of his ‘Mise en abyme’ series, first shown at a personal exhibition in New York in 2022. The painting is sold with its preparatory drawing as well as a making-of video showing the whole process, from the drawing in situ right up to the finished canvas. The buyer will get a QR code with a link to the making-of video.

The ‘mise en abyme’ process consists of putting a smaller image within the same image. Here Guillaume Chansarel was inspired by ‘Invader’: he included the Parisian ‘Space Invaders’ in his canvases.  Invader is a famous French street artist who has put up mosaic artworks (called ‘Space Invaders’) on the walls of major international cities. Guillaume Chansarel says: “Paris is a museum with bare walls just waiting to be decorated. The Space Invaders characters scattered here and there are signals, that whilst livening up the streets with their bright colours, seem to invite us to stop for a moment. Either in front of a theatrical perspective, or in front of a myriad of building facades, or even higher up on a chimney stack...”. The artwork’s associated video QR code is hidden in the canvas: the public are invited to look for the QR code in the artwork just as they would look for the city’s Space Invaders. ‘Mise en abyme’ is architecture meeting an artist, meeting another artist.

Megacities are Guillaume Chansarel's favourite subject. Through his paintings, he attempts to capture the city's graphic identity, as a photographer would press the shutter button on his camera. The uniqueness of the artist's work lies in the realistic aspect of his work but also on the original use of an innovative support: pages of print from antique books onto which he draws and then paints, and consequently which tells a completely new story.

Artwork sold unframed with a certificate of authenticity.