Malo Chapuy Reimagines Medieval Painting for an Age of Ecological Collapse
In Malo Chapuy’s hands, the visual language of the Middle Ages becomes a way to picture the present’s most unsettled fears. His Virgin with Codex (2025), which appears on the cover of this issue of Art in America, begins as a loose copy of a 16th-century painting by an anonymous artist in the Courtauld Gallery’s collection. From there, the French artist layers in gothic cathedral spaceships, fleeing populations, hazmat suits, and astronauts leaving the planet.
Speaking from his studio in Paris, Chapuy described the painting as part translation, part invention. He said he is always working from medieval or early Renaissance sources, then mixing their motifs with contemporary or sci-fi elements. The result is not a pastiche so much as a deliberate anachronism, one that treats old religious imagery as a living system rather than a sealed historical style.
Chapuy’s interest in the period is tied to its flexibility. He pointed out that Flemish painters often used familiar architecture to represent places they had never seen, such as the Temple of Solomon. That habit of translating the unknown into the known, he suggested, is still at work in his own practice. He also cited Flemish and Italian painters, along with French and German artists, as key influences, noting the long exchange between Northern and Southern European traditions. Michelangelo, he said, knew Albrecht Dürer’s engravings.
The painting also contains a small self-portrait of authorship: a QR code that reveals Chapuy’s name and the date in Latin. He said he wanted it to function like a medieval manuscript of the future, something that might be legible only to viewers centuries from now. Gothic calligraphy, he noted, can feel as opaque today as a QR code may to postapocalyptic monks.
Chapuy’s process is equally committed to historical texture. He paints on wood panels, makes his own frames, and gilds everything himself. He has also made his own lead white and studied how varnish darkens or yellows over time, knowledge he says he learned in part from art forgers and chemistry studies. Certain pigments, he added, are difficult to obtain unless one is a restorer or conservator.
For Chapuy, those material choices are inseparable from the subject matter. His paintings address apocalypse, ecological collapse, and planetary exile without abandoning the devotional gravity of the images that inspire them. In that tension between reverence and rupture, the past becomes less a refuge than a tool for seeing the present more clearly.
