marc schildge

"I was familiar with his large paintings, with their impersonal networks of color, vertiginous in their opaque superimposition, a few of which are shown here. And also his enduring fascination with chairs... And then the eruption of these archaic images, equally impersonal hallucinations of naïve cruelty, a vector for understanding his earlier works.

Cursive, fleeting painting that speaks of desire and death, as transitory as the gesture immobilized by the ink. The choice of brush and paper seems a consequence of her life in Japan, but is the development of much earlier work in these media.

The most striking of these, perhaps because it is the most disconcerting, is that of the women with two mirrors, a specular mirage in a cave of viscera, which Marc explained to me was born of Rembrandt's Bathsheba in the bath in the Louvre. And he's right: this is not the painting of the chosen one, it's a sad, violent work that resonates here with the holy terror of the Great Goddess.

The unleashing of this intimate, yet hardly individual universe, an outpouring for which Marc is merely the medium, is the dimension of his work that moves me most: desires and fears, trees and bodies, deaths and lives. "

/ Philippe Malgouyres, Curator, Department of Decorative Arts, Musée du Louvre