Louis Rollinde comes from a family of painters and grew up in old houses steeped in history. As a child, he copied Old Masters and collected pebbles — early habits that made him sensitive to the traces old worlds leave behind. He developed a fascination with museums and historic sites, but also, paradoxically, a suspicion of collections and what it means to gather and preserve things.

That tension — between wonder and skepticism, reverence and irony — has shaped his work ever since. From the start, he’s been drawn to two linked questions: what makes something hard to see (blur, invisibility, darkness), and how art gets presented in the first place (the display case, the frame, the pedestal, the catalogue). For Rollinde, the conditions under which we exhibit something are never neutral — they’re central to the work itself.

In the 1980s, working in Paris as a self-taught outsider, he founded a scenography workshop. It gave him close, almost illicit access to museums and major collections,where his custom-built frames and pedestals stood alongside works by old masters.He was operating right at the core of the art world’s machinery — and along the way, many of his clients became his collectors.

Since the 2000s, he’s expanded this practice by taking over unusual, charged spaces that speak to him: abandoned film studios, multiplex lobbies, science museums, aquariums, a medieval tower, a writer’s former home. Each site becomes a new kind of confrontation between the work and its setting.

His body of work — paintings, projections, videos, drawings, sculptures — keeps growing: an inventory of imagined collections, sculptures built from absence, panels depicting things both present and missing. A reflection to share on our capacity to grasp reality, and the extinctions of the natural world and its species now underway.