Louis Salkind is a French contemporary painter born in 1982 who raises questions about the unconscious and non-thought paths of our times through a series of allegories tinted with amusement or melancholy, and fundamentally political.

His work questions universal concepts such as sexuality, gender, religion, consumer society, taboos… the twists of which he stages. The omnipresence of bodies, lost in a fickle time and space continuum, becomes the witness of our vulnerability and sends us to the ineffable solitude to which confines enjoyment.

After having studied the techniques of classical painting, he paints a first series which he calls Floating presences.

This monumental body of work composed in three acts (38 large format pictures) has been created in three countries. It was for him the occasion to explore different modes of plastic subjectification, which led him from figuration to abstraction. This first series, shown in Paris, received instant critical acclaim (Beaux-Arts Magazine, Télérama, Huffington Post, Artension…) as well as the support of art aficionados and collectors.

Today Louis Salkind comes back with his second series Ad Vitam. He goes further into abstract figuration, made of signs and the shapeless and he asserts his artistic identity. In it he focuses on the philosophical concept of the fold which ” refolds the inside on the outside, makes the singular plural, winds time, and pushes it to its very limits until it becomes polymorphous“. If is by refolding the picture on itself, by bending it, that the artist brings a view of daily banality in its exceptional dimension. You just need to look at his figures, held hostage by their dreams, to understand that it is indeed by twisting that one reveals.

Louis Salkind’s painting is a deeply modern body of work, its desire for synthesis, orchestrated by pure lines and dynamic curves which stretch far beyond the canvas, to the off-camera that lurks, wrapping the subjects in a cloth of plural realities. Large pastel flat tints come eating the certainty of the contexts in which they are ensnared between the material reality of the world which contains them and the real fiction of the dream that inhabits them. These figures are at the crossroads of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary.

In each of his visions, the painter questions the ambivalence of the world, the futility of the full, the cry repressed by some silences, the happiness that switches us off as much as it delights us, the life urge which brushes past that of death. But if the artist bends as he wishes the world that surrounds him, he does the same with the history of art. He feeds his work with countless references which he bends in every way, playing with the collective unconscious, the several collective unconscious.

Louis Salkind writes his story and that of his art on the road, when he builds his studios across the world to feed his reflection on travels which do the same in return. The painter will soon go in South East Asia, to continue exploring the outside world and the inside world. He will create a World series, in which he will unfold his travels, looking for the “universal permanent features of human nature, the singularities which make us Others while remaining ourselves“.

Ad vitam is the latin translation of “live“, and it is indeed towards life that the artist is taking us.