LOUISE TILLEKE

Louise Tilleke is a Paris-based artist who paints, draws and films. Her work has been shown at Galerie Catherine Houard, Galerie RX, Galerie DX, Galerie Guillaume and Hôtel Costes, as well as at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains. She was nominated for the Prix Marin, whose jury was chaired by David Hockney, and, presented by Vladimir Veličković at the Institut de France, was awarded the Prix Alphonse Cellier. Her work is held in several public and private collections.

Over the past decade she has developed a body of research she calls claviérisme — “keyboardism”. It draws on languages built from computer-keyboard signs: typographic emoticons, kaomoji, and the Bliss symbols devised by Charles K. Bliss to communicate through pictograms.

Diverted from their original function, these signs stop communicating and start behaving like figures or fragments of bodies — distant echoes of proto-writing. They belong squarely to the digital age while questioning our constant need to encode and replay the world through symbols.

The term itself carries both meanings she wants: the keyboardist, for the musicality and rhythm she is after, and the gesture — an exploration of writing and play held in continuous tension between constraint and freedom.

Sato Gallery presented Claviérisme in November 2025.