A practice of alteration — from bodies to images, from images to worlds.
Marie-Lou Desmeules is a Québec-born multidisciplinary artist based in Valencia, Spain. Her practice moves across painting, Living Sculpture, photography, moving image, installation, publishing, objects, and sound.
Her work began in painting. Its defining shift occurred when the painted surface moved from canvas onto the living body.
For nearly twenty years, her Living Sculptures have transformed bodies through paint, hair, clothing, objects, pose, improvisation, music, and staging. A recognizable identity can be constructed while the living model and the artificial means producing that identity remain perceptible. Material, gesture, movement, time, instinct, and accident participate in determining what the work becomes.
Photography allowed these temporary sculptures to persist beyond the performance. The images later developed into Light Portraits: illuminated photographic objects in which transformed bodies acquire physical scale, emitted light, and architectural presence.
Over time, that investigation expanded from the transformation of a single body into the construction of an entire world.
Clara Nocturne™ extends a conceptual investigation begun with the Living Sculptures: how an identity can become present even when the artificial construction producing it remains visible.
In the Living Sculptures, the viewer already knows the identity being constructed. With Clara, there is no original to recognize. The accumulated constructions themselves have to produce the identity.
Clara began through music and has developed through films, characters, Witnesses, objects, Broadcasts, websites, and recurring fragments of narrative. Rather than following a fixed biography or linear script, she accumulates through situations, songs, images, memories, contradictions, and encounters.
What enters the work can become material for what comes next: a song can become a scene; a scene can become a story; a story can become someone else’s memory.
Generative AI enters this practice as one material among others. Desmeules is particularly interested in its instability: moments when an image resists, mutates, exaggerates, or produces an unexpected gesture. These aberrations may be retained when they redirect the work, continuing a relationship with accident and imperfection already present in the Living Sculptures.
From within Clara Nocturne emerged The Beige Institute™, an institution born from Clara’s fiction that now exists and operates in the world. What began inside the fictional world has acquired its own public presence and its first physical object, The Beige Cube.
The Institute also extends a dialogue between art and philosophy that has accompanied Desmeules’ practice for many years, through performances, writing, public encounters, and ongoing exchanges with philosophers.
Across these different forms, Desmeules’ practice remains driven by processes of alteration and construction: how something visibly made can nevertheless acquire presence, identity, and consequence.
Bodies become images.
Images become objects.
Songs become scenes.
Fictions generate real structures.
The work does not simply represent transformation. It keeps transforming.
Career Highlights
Marie-Lou Desmeules’ work has been presented internationally through exhibitions, performances, screenings, commissions, and editorial platforms.
Selected contexts include Anderson Ranch Arts Center, IVAM — Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Rivalry Projects in New York, the 64th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Interfilm Berlin at the Volksbühne, and NOWNESS.
She was commissioned to create I Am Everyone, Anyone, No One, an exhibition conceived for the Spanish television series Maricón Perdido / Queer You Are. The exhibition was featured in an approximately two-minute scene with members of the cast and the series was released internationally on HBO Max.
She also created 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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