The Barbagelata Contemporary Art Foundation proudly presented Where Paper Blossoms, a solo exhibition of Spanish-Italian-Swiss artist Beatrice Sartori, whose intricate collage works have quietly emerged as one of the most vital expressions of eco-poetic art in contemporary practice.

Where Paper Blossoms unfolded as a meditative journey through Sartori’s deeply symbolic and environmentally conscious universe—where scissors, recycled paper, and layered composition become instruments of tenderness, resistance, and remembrance. The exhibition featured key works from 2023 and 2024, including Gratitude, La Femme Fleur, Vivre en Harmonie, and Hippolyte, le Troubadour des Mers, each inviting viewers into intimate ecosystems of care, slowness, and quiet enchantment. Born in Bern in 1968 and self-taught in her practice, Sartori has cultivated a visual language both distinctive and disarming. Her collages—hand-cut with surgical precision and often layered up to eight times—merge the ethical with the aesthetic, using only recycled paper to craft quasi-sculptural compositions that bridge figuration and abstraction. The result is a body of work that evokes the gentleness of childhood, the ethical clarity of environmental stewardship, and the layered emotions of contemplative living. At the heart of Sartori’s work is a radical proposition: that art can be both beautiful and critical, both delicate and urgent. Through works like Vous reprendrez bien un peu de temps ?—featuring a butler gently offering an hourglass—Sartori stages an affective intervention against the culture of acceleration, encouraging audiences to reclaim time, presence, and attentiveness. Similarly, Horizon, with its breaching whale silhouetted against radiant waves of color, becomes a visual hymn to planetary cycles and shared vitality. “Sartori’s art insists, not loudly but insistently, on the ethics of noticing,” says curator Sophia Alvarez. “She doesn’t shock or overwhelm. She invites. Her collages ask us to dwell, to listen, and to recognize the possibility of repair—even in fragments.” The exhibition also highlighted Sartori’s connection to eco-feminist and relational art practices. From her lyrical piece Gratitude—depicting a woman in an act of offering—to L’Homme aux Oiseaux, where human and avian life intersect in peaceful cohabitation, her work echoes the philosophies of thinkers such as Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett, and Donna Haraway. Sartori’s collages are not nostalgic; they do not seek to return to a lost Eden, but to build a concrete utopia, one attentive gesture at a time. Internationally recognized and recently appointed as Artistic Ambassador for Switzerland at the UNESCO-patroned Art Connects Women exhibition in Dubai, Sartori’s influence continues to grow across borders. Her work, featured in publications including Artistonish, Circle Quarterly Art Review, and Artists of Today, represents a new model of art-making—one grounded not in spectacle but in sincerity, not in irony but in compassion. In a contemporary art world often driven by urgency and excess, Where Paper Blossoms offered something rare: a space of visual stillness and ethical clarity. A celebration of beauty as resilience, of slowness as radical, and of collage as a quiet tool for ecological and emotional transformation.