Given our nature, a predominant part of our life, of our environment consists of facades. The exhibition presents works, where such surfaces have been tangibly processed. To consider one’s own hulls with depth, lightness, and sensuality, much like a pile of peeled orange skins, seen as a spatial construct of envelopments — this is the artist’s intention.
Facade and ornament are explored together, as structuring and hierarchizing displays. Fluidly and playfully stacked upon each other are geometric and crystalline tiles on vintage kimono silk, military patterns on tropical “Aloha”, baroque shellwork-figures on high-end facade metal, expressive color pours on minimalist substrates, and in marble slabs enclosed fossils on graffiti as plastic skin. Delimitation, value judgment, and totality step back as the process consists rather of a baroque-compilatory blending.
The forms, traces, and materials collected are indeed meant to capture the tension emanating from that contact surface between interior and exterior. This also applies to the creation process, where various imprints — recordings of surfaces — are made in urban or natural environments. Monotype-esque rock impressions on fabric, graffiti paint-skin “harvested” from a wall in a Hall of Fame, or color pigments made soil samples constitute the membrane, that initiates the piece.
The accumulation of such layers produces, through successive strata, a kind of synthetic Rocaille, where the smooth, cold-industrial, and purely positive merge with the rugged, grotesque-sublime. The enveloped and the envelope, like a petrified friction surface – magmatic, thus, revealing in a fertile moment. Here crystallizes, with distance, on the fringes of mere appearance and pure substance, the expression of a freedom anchored to the ground, penetrated by that terrestrial dimension, which, though determined by instability, polydimensionality, and change, but also by commitment, dedication and responsibility.
The question of time remains. The nostalgia emanating from the created aesthetics is that of a dystopia. The stack of orange peels, fruity and tangy, is actually an irradiated, traversed, and marked still life. A twilight landscape in which abstraction is again intertwined with its surroundings.

Biography

Franck Miltgen is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Luxembourg. Following his studies in Aix-en-Provence near Marseille then in Berlin, he gained recognition through extensive solo exhibitions. For example, he occupied the entire premises of the Neumünster Abbey with his sculptural, partly monumental and environmental, but always context-related works. His pieces have been showcased in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, notably in Brussels, Tokyo, and Berlin. Many of his works are part of public and institutional collections, yet his art is primarily accessible in public spaces, an area the artist has strongly focused on in recent years. This is evident in projects like the monumental glass sculpture “Spot” and in extensive undertakings such as the Wäiss Kaul Project, where the monumental concrete sculpture “A Local Coral Reef” was created as part of the European Capital of Culture. Additionally, an accompanying book was published by Berlin-based Distanz Verlag in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural History in Luxembourg. Recently also, the artist has delved into architecture, leading, in collaboration with M3 Architectes, to the creation of the inhabitable sculpture “Floater”, on the historic steel industry basin in Dudelingen.