Marie-Lou Desmeules
Portraiture traditionally begins with a person and ends with their image.
In Marie-Lou Desmeules' Living Sculptures, the person is temporarily made into the image itself.
A Québec-born artist based in Valencia, Spain, Desmeules began her practice in painted portraiture before moving directly onto the human body during her years in Berlin. Since 2008, she has developed an unconventional form of living sculpture through a process she named Painting Surgery, bringing together painting, sculptural construction, and performance.
Working directly on human models, Desmeules builds temporary figures through layers of acrylic paint, hair, fabric, plastic, found objects, and improvised materials. Faces are reconstructed, anatomical proportions exaggerated, and familiar features distorted or replaced. The resulting figures resist easy classification: neither conventional portraits nor disguises, they occupy a strange territory between the human, the artificial, and the grotesque.
Her early surgeries gave rise to abstract and emotionally charged figures, while subsequent series turned toward cultural icons, historical personalities, celebrities, and political figures. Across these works, the grotesque operates as more than an aesthetic of distortion. It becomes a way of unsettling familiar images, confronting ideals of beauty and perfection, and exposing the absurdity of appearances. Humor, kitsch, theatrical excess, and an attraction to the bizarre coexist with moments of discomfort and unexpected beauty.
Each Painting Surgery is also an intensive, unpredictable encounter. Over several hours, the model entrusts their physical appearance to the artist, often remaining motionless and unable to see the figure taking shape. Music, instinct, material accidents, and spontaneous decisions influence the construction. The transformation is not entirely predetermined; it emerges through the physical act of making.
What makes these sculptures particularly unsettling is that the human being never ceases to exist beneath the fabricated figure. The work is visibly artificial, yet undeniably alive. The person becomes both the physical substance of the artwork and the bearer of an appearance that is not their own. The result raises questions about the power of images, the human desire to transform or reinvent appearance, and the uneasy relationship between a person and the image through which they are perceived.
Photography is integral to Desmeules' practice, recording these ephemeral constructions as carefully composed images. Selected works also exist as Light Portraits, illuminated photographic objects that bring their exaggerated forms and saturated colours into physical space. Her broader practice includes painting, experimental film, performance, and installation.
More recently, Desmeules has also developed fictional cultural projects, including Clara Nocturne and The Beige Institute, pursuing distinct artistic investigations alongside her established work.
Career Highlights
Marie-Lou Desmeules' work has been presented internationally through exhibitions, performances, screenings, artistic residencies, and commissioned projects.
Her Painting Surgeries were the subject of a special philosophical dossier in the journal Phares, following a live performance and an interdisciplinary event at Université Laval in 2011.
Selected professional contexts include Anderson Ranch Arts Center, IVAM — Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Rivalry Projects in New York, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Interfilm Berlin, and NOWNESS.
Her commissioned projects include I Am Everyone, Anyone, No One, an exhibition created for the television series Maricón Perdido / Queer You Are, and Façade, an interactive urban video installation commissioned by the City of Montréal and the Government of Québec.
Marie-Lou Desmeules with Karl Lagerfeld, Living Sculpture, Spain.
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