Welcome to the bohemian chic apartment of Artsper's co-founder

We take you to the 10th arrondissement of Paris, in the pleasant little apartment of François-Xavier Trancart, the co-founder of Artsper. For those who don't know, Artsper is an online sales platform for contemporary art. Photographs, paintings, sculptures and drawings can be purchased here. Artsper offers more than 100,000 works by 15,000 artists. With his co-founder, we talked about contemporary art of course, but also decoration. Interview.

In the background, a painting by Chris Carpi available on Artsper.

How did you get the idea to create Artsper?
We created a site for ourselves in 2013 with Hugo Mulliez. A lot of people wanted to access contemporary art, but it can be a scary environment and it is also geographically difficult to access. When you don't live in Paris or in a big city, it's not easy to access contemporary art. And even if you live in Paris, there are 1700 galleries in the capital, so it's obviously impossible to do them all. Our website thus offers a selection of contemporary art works accessible to everyone, and one can quickly find a work according to one's tastes thanks to our different categories.

Where does your passion for contemporary art come from?
We don't necessarily come from the art world, we didn't go to an art history school, we were in business school. When we created Artsper, we were uninitiated art lovers. We did the big exhibitions, we knew the great artists, but that was it, we had no network. It is our passion for culture in the broadest sense and our attraction for contemporary creation that led us to create Artsper.

You mainly work with galleries?
We even work exclusively with galleries. We're sort of a gallery of different galleries. We find galleries all over the world. When a gallery is part of our site, it is the gallery that takes care of putting its works online. We're sort of an additional sales channel for the galleries that our committee selects.

Who are your favourite contemporary artists and why?
The one that made the biggest impression on me was Jon One, a street artist. He is one of the first artists we sold on Artsper. Since then, we have had internationally renowned artists such as Jeff Koons, Murakami or JR. My other favourites are the Emmanuel Perrotin's gallery and Kamel Mennour.

What are the current trends in contemporary art?
Street art is going strong with JR, Banksy who are really making the headlines. Or the artist Kaws. And everything about African art is emerging and is very popular. There are now shows dedicated to African art in Paris such as the AKKA show which show the interest and the craze for this art.

Your apartment is of course full of pieces of art but do you prefer paintings, pictures, drawings or sculpture?
I like sculpture a lot but i don't have any due to the lack of space. I prefer paintings than pictures but I do like small format pictures such as polaroids.

Who is in charge of decoration in your house?
My wife! We have just moved and it is notably her who chose the two panoramic wallpapers Les Dominotiers. On the art side, it's more me.

You have chosen two custom-made panoramic wall murals from Les Dominotiers to wake up the walls of your room and your child's room, in an apartment where the walls are rather white to make place for works of art. What made you decide to put wallpapers in your home?
I don't see your panoramic wall murals as wallpaper at all, I see them as a painting that comes to animate a room. I have a friend who put a landscape of Venice on his patio and it spoke to me immediately. It seemed obvious to us to put a panoramic wallpaper when we moved in.

For your bedroom, you have chosen the Palmar Grey wall mural, what do you particularly like about it?
This panoramic wallpaper creates a permanent travel atmosphere with its palm trees and pretty beach. In grey, it is very serene and brings a lot of softness to our room. We were surprised by the final rendering of a wall mural on our walls : we don't see the strips at all, it looks like a painting laid in one piece.

Picture of Mick Jagger by Jacques Benaroch. Available on Artsper.

You fell in love with the Woody Chesnut panoramic wallpaper from Les Dominotiers for your son's room, can you explain this choice?
Besides the aesthetic side, I would have loved to have this in my room when I was a child, it creates a real fairy-tale world. It feels like we're in an enchanted forest. This wallpaper is self-sufficient and is the centerpiece of our son's bedroom. And he loves it!