Multidisciplinary artist born in 1982, Louis Salkind first studied theatre, dance, and singing before turning to painting. From these stage experiences, he retains a strong sense of dramaturgy and composition. His canvases become spaces where he stages reality, questions the unconscious, and explores the symbolic tensions of our time.
After studying classical techniques, he spent several years developing a substantial body of human figures. This research gave rise to Floating Presences, a vast ensemble of 38 large-scale works conceived as a multi-Act project. The series received notable critical acclaim and was presented in several exhibitions. Born from dream imagery, these paintings form a silent opera of bodies cut off from space and time, oscillating between sacred iconography and profane allegory. The omnipresence of figures bears witness to our vulnerabilities and to a solitude inherent in the human condition.
Between two Acts, he presented the series Théâtre Premier. Here, the artist explores the concept of representation as a crossroads between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Masks from so-called “primitive” cultures confront contemporary uniforms, giving rise to a theatre of the world in which modernity reveals its archaic roots.
In February 2026, Louis Salkind exhibited his series Ad Vitam at the Galerie Dix9. In it, he affirms a freer figuration tending toward abstraction, composed of signs and formless elements. At the heart of this research lies the philosophical concept of the fold: folding the image back onto itself to blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, singular and plural, present and memory. The artist reveals the exceptional dimension of everyday banality.
His work, enriched by multiple references to art history, questions universals such as gender, religion, consumer society, and taboos. Between figuration and abstraction, dream and reality, Louis Salkind constructs a profoundly modern body of painting in which the body becomes the site of an inner theatre in perpetual transformation.