Malo Chapuy, whose Virgin with Codex (2025) appears on the cover of this issue of Art in America, finds the lexicon of medieval painting well suited for our times of apocalyptic anxieties as we face ecological collapse and rehash the Crusades. From his studio in Paris, he told us about the painting.
Virgin with Codex is your usual Flemish virgin—a loose copy of a 16th-century painting by an anonymous artist in the Courtauld Gallery’s collection. I’m always translating medieval or early Renaissance paintings, mixing their motifs with either contemporary or sci-fi elements. In the background, you see gothic cathedral spaceships.
There’s always some sort of ecological disaster in my backgrounds, or else you see the consequences of a disaster. Maybe it’s a population being forced to flee, people wearing hazmat suits, or astronauts leaving the planet. I often find ways to sneak in my signature, as many artists did back then. Here, I designed a QR code that gives you my name and the date in Latin. Scanning it only works with some smartphones and at certain angles, but the idea was to make the medieval manuscripts of the future. Gothic calligraphy is a strange script that today is very hard to read. I figured that QR codes could be seen similarly years from now by postapocalyptic medieval monks.
Flemish painters would use what they knew to represent something they’d never seen. Let’s say they needed to paint the Temple of Solomon: They’d use the cathedral in their city as a model. So there was already a process of translating imagery into something familiar and contemporary, and I’m just adding another layer of translation.
Most of my inspirations are Flemish or Italian painters, plus a few French and German ones here and there. Flemish and Italian styles were very distinct in the early 15th century, but there were also lots of artists who served as a transition between Northern and Southern European approaches. Michelangelo, for instance, knew Albrecht Dürer’s engravings. As time progressed, there was exchange between the two worlds, and their styles started to merge.
Malo Chapuy: Virgin with Codex, 2025.
I was always interested in religious paintings, and the more I learned, the further I went back in time. There is such a diversity of medieval and Renaissance styles across geographies and spanning centuries, and that means there’s room to use the era’s codes while still making them my own—all while talking about what I want to talk about: the apocalypse, ecological collapse, and planetary exile.
In a way, I’m making forgeries. I try to keep the techniques and materials as similar as I can to those of the Old Masters. I think that’s what makes the anachronisms work, and I want to give my paintings the appearance of age. Over time, certain oil paints might either darken or become translucent, so you get shades that were not present originally. I tried to mimic that. Virgin with Codex emulates the original painting’s translucent hair.
Historical accuracy can be tricky. Certain pigments are pretty much unavailable if you’re not a restorer or conservator, especially toxic pigments like arsenic yellow. I’ve had to make my own lead white. I mostly paint on wood panels, because that’s the support that was used in the Renaissance, and I do all my own woodworking. I make my frames and gild everything myself. I had to learn things from art forgers and chemistry studies—for instance, what type of varnish darkens or yellows a painting. Art forgers don’t necessarily give away all their tips.… —As told to Emily Watlington
