Multidisciplinary artist born in 1982, Louis Salkind develops a body of work at the crossroads of theatre, opera, dance, and the visual arts. From these stage experiences, he retains a strong sense of dramaturgy and composition. Painting gradually became his preferred medium: a space in which he stages reality, probes the unconscious, and explores the symbolic tensions of our time.
After studying classical techniques, he spent several years developing a significant corpus of human figures without seeking to exhibit them. This research led to Floating Presences (2015–2019), a vast ensemble of 38 large-scale paintings conceived as a multi-Act project. The series received notable critical acclaim and was presented in several exhibitions. Born from dream imagery, these canvases compose a silent opera of bodies cut off from space and time, oscillating between sacred iconography and profane allegory. The omnipresence of figures becomes a testament to our vulnerabilities and to a solitude inherent to the human condition.
Between two Acts, he presented Theatre Premier, a transitional series conceived as a bridge between the early developments of Floating Presences and the continuation of the project. Here, the artist explores the concept of representation as a crossroads between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Masks drawn from so-called “primitive” ethnic traditions confront contemporary uniforms, giving rise to a theatre of the world in which modernity reveals its archaic roots.
In February 2026, Louis Salkind presented his second series, Ad Vitam (2026), at Galerie Dix9. In this body of work, he affirmed a freer form of figuration tending toward abstraction, composed of signs, folds, and formless shapes. At the core of this research lies the philosophical concept of the fold: folding the image onto itself to blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, individual and collective, present and memory. By compressing the scene, the artist reveals the exceptional dimension of everyday banality.
Nourished by multiple references to art history and enriched by his travels, his work questions universals such as gender, religion, consumer society, and contemporary taboos. Between figuration and abstraction, dream and reality, Louis Salkind constructs a profoundly modern painting in which the body becomes the site of an inner theatre in perpetual transformation.