Malo Chapuy

Malo Chapuy (born 1995, Laon, France) is a French artist who lives and works in Paris. His practice revisits the visual languages of medieval and early Renaissance art, drawing particularly on religious imagery, illuminated manuscripts, Gothic painting and the traditions of tempera and gilding on wood. Chapuy approaches these historical forms through deliberate anachronism, introducing contemporary objects, technologies and architectural references into compositions inspired by the old masters. In doing so, he creates temporal dislocations in which medieval iconography encounters the visual and material conditions of the present. Chapuy’s early works extended medieval imagery onto unexpected contemporary supports, including motorcycle helmets, branded shoes and protective plastic visors transformed into forms resembling stained glass. His use of traditional techniques such as egg tempera, gilding and painting on wood reinforces the connection with historical image-making while allowing him to construct new relationships between sacred imagery and contemporary objects. The resulting works often function as hybrid image-objects, combining the status of relic, painting and everyday artefact. The artist's interest in anachronism also extends to his compositions, in which late Gothic and early Renaissance scenes can accommodate modern architecture, industrial structures and technological elements. In his recent paintings, Chapuy has developed this temporal dialogue through scenes that place biblical narratives and medieval visual conventions within environments marked by ecological and technological transformation. Works shown at the 17th Lyon Biennale in 2024, for example, introduced elements such as wind turbines into compositions inspired by early Renaissance painting. His exhibition *Memorabilia* at mor charpentier in Paris in 2024–25 further developed this approach, combining Gothic aesthetics with brutalist architecture and images of ecological catastrophe, post-apocalyptic landscapes and speculative futures. Medieval symbols and contemporary forms become components of a fictional visual history in which the sacred, the technological and the ecological coexist. Chapuy graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2022. During his final year, he was awarded the Prix agnès b. by Les Amis des Beaux-Arts de Paris, one of six €5,000 prizes awarded to students by the association in 2022. His work was subsequently presented in the exhibition of the 2022 prize and scholarship recipients at the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins in Paris in 2023. Since graduating, Chapuy has exhibited in a growing number of institutional contexts. His work was presented at the 17th Lyon Biennale in 2024, at FRAC Île-de-France and the Louvre-Lens in 2025, and is included in the 2026 programme of the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. His participation in *Gothiques*, the major exhibition at Louvre-Lens devoted to the persistence and transformations of Gothic art from the Middle Ages to the present, further situates his practice within a contemporary rethinking of medieval visual culture. Across painting and image-object making, Chapuy continues to use historical techniques and iconographies not as exercises in reconstruction, but as a means of bringing different moments in time into contact and examining how images, beliefs and forms of representation survive, mutate and acquire new meanings.