marc schildge

The body as food, naked flesh and clothing as a second skin, through the opaque material of paint and the transparencies of ink and watercolor: these are just some of the themes that intertwine in Marc Schildge's work.

The fruit of a long period of residence in Japan and Korea, in London and Paris, his paintings reflect a desire to approach work on the figure with a fresh eye, shaped in part by contact with Asia. The delicacy of the drawings, produced on Korean paper and using age-old Asian art techniques, is matched by the explosion of bold colors in the paintings, whose format is reminiscent of the Western model of fresco and history painting.

Strange, dreamlike, sometimes violent, but also full of humor, these works seek in their own way to weave together the disparate threads of life and death, dream and reality. Skulls, hats, figures and garments are all elements of carnal, mysterious tales in which beauty is at the same time the ogre, and the setting is a voluptuous yet disquieting nature.

But first and foremost, it's about painting and working with form, thinking beyond the categories of abstraction and figuration.