Jorge Marin - The Body as a Landscape

With over 25 years of artistic work, he has successfully entered into Mexico's artistic scene and has become a representative of figurative international sculpture.

Marin’s remarkable career has included over 150 exhibitions in Latin America, North America and Europe.

The sculptures of Jorge Marin reflect in bronze the intrinsic strength and force that emanates from its creation and permits him to construct dynamic bodies, full of movement, which challenge gravity and rotate in space supported on one point.

 There is a constant subject in Jorge Marin’s sculpture, which is the body as an entity containing the spirit, always appearing in the splendor of its physical state. The being is always explained by what contains it, the body.

Today, the body is conceived more as a space than an object in and of itself. It is the scenario of the human struggle as well as its synthesis and its memory. Thus, the human figure narrates humanity’s own becoming, and the body is, after all, simply landscape.

His work also represents the struggle between the coldness of bronze and the diverse emotions that his subject's evocate: the perfect balance of the equilibrists and his winged figures has become his particular seal. While it is true that his series of bodies tends to be based on the triumph of their acrobatic postures, metaphorically these bodies are speaking and surrendering to the temptation of risk and the prophecy of failing and falling down from this dubious paradise in which we live.

Another notable trait in his work is the mask, an attempt to depersonalize his sculptures and become another medium of expression of a body that contains universal symbols in itself.

“My artistic proposition follows my vision and perception of the world, how I interpret it and how I see it. From there, I dealt diverse topics, always related to the people of the 20^th and 21^st century, that is to say contemporary. It is also possible to say that they are questions of the man of all the times – as the paternity, the game, the balance, the fear, the love, the hatred, etc.”

He currently exhibits "Wings of a City" in Mexico City, which opened in 2010, and another of his exhibits, "The Body as a Landscape", has been shown in museums and galleries throughout Europe since 2011, including Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Istanbul, Berlin, Brussels Budapest, Timisoara, and will be shown in St Petersburg and Brussels .  His work is currently on permanent exhibition at R E Welch Gallery in Seattle.

Philippe Dutilleul - Poet of Light

That delicate touch of light!

Each painting that Dutilleul undertakes is a new quest. His desire to paint, and always to renew, goes hand-in-hand with the subtle investigation into light and shade.

In the midst of a very successful career with prestigious representation in one of the best galleries in Paris, Dutilleul’s health faltered. He suffered from an illness that robbed him of his sight. For nearly fifteen years he was subjected to fevers and deadly headaches. Fortunately he recovered a few years ago and started painting again. He now feels the illness brought him to where he is today. There is no regret. There is an enhanced love of life. Light is an obsession.

It is these glimpsed effects that he will search for and collect in the area around Uzes, the Cevennes, the Lozere and further afield in Corsica and Andalucia. "Lighting interests me perhaps even more than landscape" he reveals.

His passion is such that, whilst painting, he is already imagining the quest for and discovery of new colors for his next works. Every day he feels both his vision and skill developing. Technically he begins with a luminous, lightweight coat of acrylic paint, next enriching the canvas with delicate strokes of oil paint. This results in an ethereal, heavenlymountain landscapes, using royal blue, violet, at the same time introducing in the shadows – some secret hints of red ochre. The gorge thus illuminated, becomes suddenly sensuous . . .

Originally from the misty north, Dutilleul attended the Decorative Arts School in Toumai, and then the Acadamy of Fine Arts in Douai.  Inspired by paintings of an earlier age, he practiced the delicate craft of restoring paintings for the Museums of Strasbourg.  Hooked on art history, he became intimately acquainted with the Old Masters.  This interest has never left him, for even today, to relax, he makes accomplished copies of an Arcimboldo, a Rembrant or a Vermeer.  His relationship with the latter is very special, in fact it is not unusual for him to follow the Dutchman’s example of using almost photographic soft-focus in the foreground combined with strong keylight.  A colorist, he treasures memories of some key works:  Monet, Matisse, Bonnard or even Bioules.

At the moment of achieving superlative beauty – a perfect footprint in the clay – he makes a sky shine with fire beyond a jagged horizon, giving us moments of pure unforgettable poetry.  From one canvas to the next, Dutilleul makes the great spectacle come alive for us, with a background accompaniment of subtle, sublime music.