Calvin Marcus
Skin Paintings
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Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle
The delicate surfaces of Calvin Marcus’s Skin Paintings reflect and refract the natural light that floods the Museum Dhont-Dhaenens’s unique glass architecture, creating a subtle and shifting dialogue between painting, viewer, and space. Skin Paintings presents oils on linen that depict magnified renderings of the artist’s own flesh, shown alongside bronze and ceramic. Inspired by the artifacts of early human civilizations, this body of work extends Marcus’s investigation of media, process, and the abject within the familiar.
These are paintings about the body—not in terms of its associations with subjecthood or identity, but through the lens of abstraction. The artist hones in on the textures, colors, blemishes, and fragility of the epidermis. Skin becomes a metaphor for perception, for memory, and for the cycles of life and decay.
As the artist notes, “The horror of examining skin this closely is the threat of its puncture.” Look at anything long enough and it will become pure surface, devoid of referent; hyperrealism bends back around to the uncanny.
Skin Paintings is the artist’s first solo presentation at a European institution.
