Pietro Sarto
Born in 1930.
After a childhood in Ticino and years in Neuchâtel and Lausanne, he spent time in Paris, where he discovered printmaking through his contact with Albert Flocon and Johnny Friedlaender. On his return to Switzerland, he organised intaglio workshops before founding the one in Villette in 1968; it was transferred to Saint-Prex in 1971. This venue became a space for creation and exchange, where artists, printers and publishers worked together.
For Sarto, a print is not simply the reproduction of a completed image. A plate may pass through several states; each passage through the press fixes a moment in an ongoing investigation. Etching, aquatint, photogravure, drypoint and oil painting respond to one another.
The artist may take up on canvas a question that arose on copper, or shift a pictorial intuition onto paper. Landscapes, figures and literary references thus open up parallel paths rather than a series of separate genres. Dante, Nietzsche, Paul Celan and Mandelstam are among the presences evoked by the works exhibited at the Musée Jenisch Vevey in 2022.
In 1977, Sarto took part in the creation of the Fondation William Cuendet & Atelier de Saint-Prex. His gifts of prints and the archives of the workshops form part of the core of its collection, now associated with the Cabinet cantonal des estampes in Vevey. The retrospective « Chemins détournés » presented nearly sixty prints and five paintings, highlighting this fertile dialogue between gestures, materials and reading.
His practice makes the workshop a place of experimentation as much as a place of transmission.
