Marc Mulders

The oeuvre of Marc Mulders is determined by what may very well be the great theme in the history of art: the endless cycle of life and death. The expression of living and dying, death and resurrection, has long held a central place in Western painting, and Marc Mulders has deliberately situated himself in the midst of that tradition. 

In Mulders’s early works, one often sees motifs that stem directly from the Christian religious tradition: the image of Christ suffering, the crucifixion, the crown of thorns and the Pietà. Many times he also refers to the work of artists for whom he has great admiration from a painterly point of view: Rembrandt, Mantegna, Dürer and Grünewald.

The paintings with more pronounced religious themes are followed by series of paintings with images of flowers and dead game, fish and fowl. Mulders paints the game not as tableaux in the classical sense of hunting still lifes or as macabre depictions of flesh and blood. His aim is not so much to render, but rather to transform the ended life into a dynamic image. The beauty of the body and the skin are reborn, as it were, in the paint. Through the intensity of painting, wet into wet and layer upon layer, there arises an almost physical relationship between the subject and the depiction. In Mulders’s own words: ‘the flesh becomes paint, and the paint becomes flesh.’

In contrast to inescapable mortality, however, the artist also shows the beauty of life, and the paintings of Mulders are often shamelessly beautiful. The impasto paint jumps off the canvas, the colors radiate gloriously or, on the contrary, remain hidden in splendid nuances; brushstroke and line execution vibrate with energy and expression. The still lifes with flowers verge on the aesthetic. Buds, calyxes and stamens loaded with pollen attest to the sensuality of life. But this splendor also has an ephemerality that makes us aware of our own transience, as Mulders paints his bouquets in all phases of blossom and decay. He paints life as it bursts open, and he captures the moment at which it lays itself to rest.

Marc Mulders’ studio nowadays is a barn in the middle of a field of flowers. He calls his garden ‘my own private Giverny’, in reference to the famous gardens of Claude Monet, one of his artistic heroes. In his paintings, almost abstract now, Mulders follows the natural world he sees around him. ‘In spring and summer I sniff all the aromas. In the autumn I paint with the echo of all those magnificent flowers in my head. And in winter I’m driven by a longing for the new flowers that will grow in my field’,