Malo Chapuy – L’exode des pèlerins, 2024 ; Saint sauvant les inondés, 2024 ; Saint Jérôme pénitent, 2024

Malo Chapuy draws his inspiration from the old masters, making images and objects using the medieval techniques of tempera and gilding on wood. With a fondness for anachronisms, Chapuy also embraces other types of material, such as motorbike helmets and designer sneakers, which he transforms into modern relics. Using pictorial compositions from the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods as a starting point, he makes modifications. In this kind of way, Malo Chapuy works with time warps, employing a wealth of artistic quotations and creating playful links between religious episodes and contemporary events.

In resonance with the medical and sacred history of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, Malo Chapuy’s works explore current health and ecological crises through biblical narratives. In an age of global warming, the artist paints scenes of flooding and exodus, with gentlemen fleeing pollution or disappearing beneath the waves. Depiction of penitence, with Saint Jerome kneeling before Christ, strangely crucified on a wind turbine, draw the viewer into a kind of meditation linked to the expiation of one’s sins and the forgiveness of one’s shortcomings. At once dystopian and apocalyptic, Malo Chapuy’s image-objects use techniques and compositions from the past to explore the future of our planet.