A World Built from Paper: The Extraordinary Universe of Maud Vantours

From a Parisian studio, Maud Vantours has transformed one of the most humble materials on earth into sculptural worlds of colour, geometry, and light — earning the trust of luxury's most revered names in the process.

There is something quietly radical about choosing paper as your primary medium. In the hierarchy of fine art materials — marble, bronze, oil — paper sits near the bottom, perceived as transitional, impermanent, the stuff of sketches and grocery lists. Maud Vantours has spent her career dismantling that assumption entirely.

Born in 1985, the Parisian designer and artist founded her creative studio after studying fabric design and material research — a background that gave her an instinctive feel for how materials behave, fold, absorb light, and acquire volume. Paper, for Vantours, became not a limitation but a liberation: a surface she could fold, perforate, stack, and layer into compositions that seem to defy the laws of a flat sheet.

“"My work revolves around drawing, colour, and material”

The craft

What distinguishes the Studio Maud Vantours from the growing field of paper art is its commitment to the handmade. Every cutout is performed in-house. Models, sculptures, and flowers — including installations involving thousands of individual blooms — are assembled by hand at the Paris studio, located in the 20th arrondissement. The result is work that retains an unmistakable warmth and precision, qualities that resist mechanical reproduction.

Her practice, which she describes as sitting at the intersection of art, design, and craftsmanship, has expanded well beyond paper in recent years. Plexiglas, metal, and wood have entered her vocabulary, allowing the studio to scale its techniques to architectural dimensions. A paper flower installed in a boutique and a monumental scenography for a luxury fragrance house are, to Vantours, part of the same vocabulary — just spoken at different volumes.

Personal works

While her commercial clients are among the most recognised names in global luxury, it is in her personal works that Vantours' artistic voice is perhaps most clearly heard. These pieces — explorations of geometry, colour, botanical form, and movement — represent an ongoing research into what paper can do when freed from the constraints of a brief.

Geometry distils her fascination with structure: layered lines and angular planes that explore the tension between mathematical rigour and organic chance. Flowers and Flora approach the natural world from two different distances — the former assembling paper petals with botanical precision, becoming the studio's most iconic signature series; the latter more intimate, investigating how shifts in colour alter our emotional response to familiar natural forms. Spirales turns inward, using circular compositions to investigate rhythm, repetition, and the hypnotic pull of radial symmetry, while Oscillations moves outward into landscape — undulating paper formations that blur the boundary between sculpture and painting. Rounding out the personal works is Paper Food, a playful and more recent departure in which familiar culinary objects are rendered entirely in paper, balancing humour with the same technical precision that defines everything the studio produces.

An ecosystem of luxury

The studio's client list reads like a roll-call of French and international prestige. Vantours has created work for Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Guerlain, Balmain, Kenzo, Valentino, and Audemars Piguet, among dozens of others — alongside names spanning fashion, spirits, watchmaking, and sport, including Lancôme, Viktor & Rolf, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Bombay Sapphire, Louis XIII, Adidas, and GAP. Campaigns, editorial shoots, window installations, and full scenographies have carried her work from Parisian boutiques to galleries in New York and beyond.

What luxury brands recognise in the studio's work is its dual nature: it is crafted enough to feel entirely human, and composed enough to photograph as perfectly as any digital render. In an era dominated by CGI campaigns, the tactile authenticity of Vantours' paper worlds carries genuine communicative weight.

Material ethics

Notably, Vantours has made sustainability a structural part of her practice rather than a footnote. Paper — her primary material — is among the most recyclable in common use. The studio optimises material orders to reduce offcuts, and any surplus is repurposed for models and smaller sculptures. Suppliers are sourced predominantly from the Île-de-France region, keeping the studio's supply chain local and its footprint measurable.

It is a philosophy that aligns neatly with a broader shift in how luxury clients are thinking about the scenographies and campaigns they commission — and it gives the studio's work an integrity that extends well beyond the visual.

“"We see a window display as a three-dimensional canvas”

Maud Vantours continues to exhibit in France and internationally, represented in Paris by Artjingle and in New York by Artstar. Whether in a gallery context or deployed in service of a brand campaign, her work carries the same essential quality: an insistence that beauty, patience, and the simplest of materials are enough to build entire worlds.

Discover more work by Maud Vantours at maudvantours.com

Photos: Online Gallery (GoFlo)