Ugo Schildge

Ugo Schildge was born in Paris, grew up in an artistic environment between collectors and artists. He lives in Paris and works in his studio in Montreuil. Very early on sensitized to art and especially to painting, in 2008, when he was studying in a large school in Montreal, his passion for art was stronger, that he returned to Paris to study at the Fine Arts. Ugo Schildge was a student of Guiseppe Penone for three years and shares with this artist the passion for wood in all its forms. He worked with Jean Marc Bustamante, then with Tadashi Kawamata. The artist was Bernard Moninot's assistant and also did an exchange for a year at the School of Fine Arts in Sao Paulo. Back at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he took part in the replica of Marcel Duchamp's "Grand Verre" (The Bride laid bare by her celibates, Even). A film is directed by Pascal Goblot and screened at the Center Pompidou in September 2014. For the Harmonie series, through wood, materials and selected natural elements, Ugo Schildge explores the phenomenon of the creation of an image: how an image can hide another, even dozens of others, and thus reveal itself to the viewer in an unexpected way. After having worked for a long time with mechanical processes to confront painting with this notion of movement, the artist here gives birth to kinetic images, created only by the repetition of singular forms, highlighted by the strength of their color and their matter. This search for total harmony is at the heart of the series: the viewer must be protected from any point too leaning on the canvas to let his imagination speak. He must be faced with this intermingling of forms, their presence, their disappearance, to imagine the free movement of the image he contemplates, and whose possibilities are endless once the balance is reached. The material is also a central element of this series: the artist associates for the color sets natural pigments, water and plaster. In this combination, the reaction of the bodies is always uncertain and surprising. It is only long after the installation that the colors are revealed, diffuse, poetic, uncontrollable stains, to which the plaster gives a raw density. A dimension of randomness between the creative process, and far from being an obstacle, the artist seizes upon it, to put the material to the test of balance. Questioning the traditional form of a work, blurring the line between painting and sculpture, canvas and supports, control and freedom, Harmonie invites the viewer to a perpetual back and forth between the figurative and the abstract, conscious and unconscious, technique and the illusion.