Interviews From Yale Radio / Artists, Curators And More

Mathieu Malouf "I am genuinely trying to make beautiful paintings. Not beautiful by contemporary standards of beauty, but something more atemporal or enduring. My paintings are not anchored in any particular period. I like art that is beautiful, even if that makes no sense in our era. No one discusses whether things are beautiful or not anymore. It’s more difficult to paint women than men. I have only painted men—nude men, gay men, famous men. I think men can be more ugly and weird, and it doesn’t really matter; they are more forgiving. But painting women is more difficult. I started noticing how intensely omnipresent women were in art, and I thought that I probably have something to learn from that; by trying to paint women, maybe I’ll discover why. It is a way for me to learn about something that people have traditionally thought is beautiful. Painting women is a way to address art history itself. The Odalisque as a historical genre intrigues me. This was a woman who was essentially enslaved, but she was a