Bio Pigments atelier by Marius Melissas
The contemporary art world finds itself in a strange situation nowadays. On one hand, contemporary art stands for the new; on the other, it’s become an old and saturated place. Galleries aren’t investing in the sustainable creation of art or motivating the artists to push in this direction.
My project Bio Pigments atelier aims to change this paradigm. It is a project that revolves around creating your own paints and, in my case, a collection of paintings made with micro-algae pigments. All the paintings here exhibited were made using two distinct techniques. The first one is based on the beeswax technique, something I found while researching ancient Egyptian art. I find it fascinating how this technique, thousands of years old, is still perfectly applicable today, yet rarely used. The second technique is based on agar-agar, a component that is derived from algae, making a bioplastic with it as a way of locking the pigments into the canvas. Using the agar-agar technique demands a lot of pre-mixing and setting up, and once everything is ready to be poured onto the canvas, everything must go very fast. The bioplastic film dries out extremely quickly and solidifies on the canvas in less than ten minutes. This forces the artist to paint in an immediate, unhesitating, and intuitive manner, which corresponds exactly to what I sought to create and the style of painting I enjoy. Since I had to proceed with a lot of trial and error, experimenting with all the combinations of pigments in their correctly proportioned quantities and carefully documenting them to achieve a functional paint, it felt very liberating for me to finally put my paints to artistic use. I have come to associate it with the natural processes visible in a lot of plant life, storing and saving energy year-round for its flowers to bloom a mere few days of Spring. Like flowers the pigments I use are ephemeral. The beauty of nature is never eternal and that is something that is central to my artistic process right now, thus the fading of these pigments over time is part of the nature of my paintings. Trying to work together with nature isn’t easy but the more we try the better we understand how to work with it. And the more we understand it the more we’ll find techniques that work and allow us to preserve the natural elements necessary for regenerative painting.
For me, none of these paintings are supposed to hide any symbolism or higher motives. They are simply products of my imagination and express nature in its widest sense. Not nature limited to plants, animals, or landscapes, but nature as that which is automatically created. I do not set to work with any preconceived idea of what I want to make, I just tune into a serene, free-flowing vibration inside my own mind and let the materials and tools guide me, just like listening to music directs your body in dance. The paintings paint themselves. I never wonder whether what I paint is recognizable or understandable and do not try to interpret my works. I simply let nature do its magic and I follow what it dictates. In fact, nature has guided the whole of this project, from the refusal of chemically synthesized paints and the making of my own paints, to the free-flow style of painting I have used to the subject matter that is depicted in these paintings. I hope that spectators – entirely free to see in my works what they want – will also consider them in the way I painted them, just naturally.
My main goal was to make painting a regenerative practice, not something that uses finite resources as its building block. Artistic creation is said to be one of the most important things for humans, but we aren’t investing in making this specific practice natural. The practice can be expanded to a lot of new resources and mediums that are yet to be discovered as well. With bio pigments atelier, I intend to take a small first step in creating more awareness around this issue and bring change to the art of our time.
