From Balthus to Beksinski: the Art of Danny Malboeuf

Lloyd D. Graham

Danny Malboeuf (‘kolaboy’)1 is a self-trained artist/illustrator from Statesville, North

Carolina. Working mainly in acrylics, he paints in an allegorical figurative style that
combines surrealist, symbolist and pre-Raphaelite sensibilities.2 His gallery and journal
are at http://kolaboy.deviantart.com/

First, let me say that this essay consists purely of personal impressions. I apologise in
advance for mixing the famous with the less-well-known, and the living with the dead,
but it seems to me that there is much common ground in comments made by, or about,
the Swiss/Polish/French painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), Polish surrealist
Zdzislaw Beksinski, and American artist Danny Malboeuf (kolaboy). In addition, I must
apologise to my subjects: I am sure that none of the three would welcome such direct
critiques and comparisons of their work, with Malboeuf always delightfully evasive on
specifics, Balthus ever convinced that his paintings should be seen, not read about or read
into3, and Beksinski claiming that “What’s important is not what is visible but what is
hidden… Or in other words, what is revealed to the soul, not what the eyes can see and
can be named.”4 Foolish, I rush in where angels fear to tread. I recall with trepidation
Beksinski’s response to Dziworski’s cinematic homage to his art: “This way some jerk
has blown his nose over my paintings – there is no relation at all! […] It is just stupid,
awkward, hopelessly parochial and doesn’t lead anywhere.”5

Categories and creative process

“Fantastic Realism cannot be compared with Surrealism as a garden cannot be compared with a
jungle. The fantasy of the Surrealist comes from the subconscious without formal order or relation,
whereas the Fantastic Realist uses his images selectively. [...] The automatism of images of the
Surrealist are a sharp contrast to the meaningful symbolism of the Fantastic Realist” – Wolfgang
Grasse 6

It is easy to imagine Malboeuf’s complex and intensely symbolic tableaux as gardens of

Fantastic Realism; as others have remarked, his figures often appear to have been placed
in their unusual settings with the deliberateness of statues. And yet this artist professes a
process that is largely lacking in conscious intervention: “Thinking is detrimental to the
purity of expression, and a ‘figured out’ painting always looked figured out. What is the
meaning behind a particular piece? They all mean something, but I never know exactly
what while I’m painting them. Maybe it’s the visual equivalent of speaking in tongues.”7
And elsewhere “I detest exactitudes, limits, and definitive answers. If you define
something unequivocally, you limit its meaning.”8 Beksinski took this a step further,
refusing even to title his works: “It misses the point to ask me what scenes in my
paintings ‘mean’. Simply, I do not know, myself. Moreover, I am not at all interested in
knowing […] I react strongly to images that have no obvious answer to their mysteries. If
there is a key to their construction, they are simply illustration.”9 Like Beksinski, Balthus
left the titling of his paintings to others.10 Nor would he be drawn into commentary on his
intentions, declining with a polite “I can’t talk about my own work. I never do. I’m a
religious painter.”11
As Dali observed, “Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of
cheating.”12 It is significant that, in addition to painting, Beksinski produced a corpus of
extraordinarily detailed monochrome drawings, at once both ghastly and beautiful.
Malboeuf too has an impressive body of such work, typically of fantastic organic
chimeras whose monstrous biology seems all too credible. Who would have thought that
we could feel such empathy for the offspring of a genetic engineering program gone
horribly wrong?

Shared attributes and circumstances

Malboeuf is completely self-taught. This is no bad thing; to quote Beksinski, “I have no

regrets over not having had any formal training as an artist. [...] I must discover the
answers on my own.”13 Even Balthus, who grumbled that he had had to teach himself
everything by trial and error, and who learned his craft mostly by copying the work of
Old Masters, was well aware that he could not have learned what he needed to know
from the art schools of his day.14 All three were marginalised by the avant-garde art
cliques of the times in which they began to forge lonely paths towards their intensely
personal visions. Balthus admitted “my early career was very difficult, as I was despised
by my generation”, 11 while Piotr Dmochowski’s book Struggle for Beksinski describes
some of the many difficulties that he encountered in attempts to popularize his friend’s
art.15
In addition to their autodidact status and early isolation, these artists share a
number of similarities in temperament and character: all modest to the point of self-
effacement, private and enigmatic, and yet at the same time well-read, passionate and
articulate. All three stand in awe of the genius of music. Balthus claimed “I should like to
render the beauty of the divine. Only Mozart has contrived to do so.”16, while Beksinski
is on record as saying “I am primarily inspired by music. […] What if I had my druthers?
I would repeat after Churchill with a modification: ‘I would compose music for my first
thousand years in heaven.’”17 And Malboeuf: “All that I have created is born of my
understanding of music, and of my own sorrow. […] Music is the only voice I hear.”18
In fact, Malboeuf and Beksinski share a profound aversion to silence. The former
writes “Music, the beautiful lie. It taught you to hate silence above all, and so you do.
Still, small voices wait in the folds of silence”, whereas the latter went so far as to
confess “Silence during the day fills me with horror. To avoid it I am ready to switch on
the vacuum cleaner.”19 Naturally, both men would listen to music while painting. They
are further connected by an electric wit and an ongoing dissatisfaction with their own
work,20 attributes which find a joint expression in Beksinski’s “You may say that I’m in
love with myself, but this affection is quite unrequited, as most often I do not satisfy
myself.”21
Beauty and the beast

Of Balthus, critic Jean Leymarie observed that “He shares Rilke’s sense of the wonder
and mystery of young girls, including the mystery of angels. Angels, as Rilke says, are
frightening. And beauty itself is frightening. Balthus is very sensitive, he shows in his
environment, in beings and in nature, that which is divine. Obviously, he is full of fun
and irony too. The Lucifer in him is unavoidable, and Lucifer was the most splendid of
angels.”11 Just as Balthus takes a venal scene of violation in The Guitar Lesson and
surreptitiously models it according to the 15th-century Villeneuve-lès-Avignons Pietà,22
so Malboeuf models odd but ostensibly profane images such as The Cirrus Sea and A
Lonely Ski Trail as a Madonna col Bambino and Pietà, respectively.
To mortals, light loses meaning in the absence of darkness. An obvious
justification for the presence of unsavoury elements in some of Malboeuf’s paintings is to
heighten the contrast within the picture, thereby intensifying the beauty found elsewhere
in the composition. Why else introduce excrement into the mystical I am Two, We are
Three, or urine into the otherwise beautiful The Northern Lights? Nothing so clearly
highlights the difference between oil and water as mixing the two. But, while convenient
– and perhaps, on one level, accurate – logical explanations such as this sell the artist
short. Speaking of Balthus’s work, the painter François Rouan hinted at a deeper mystery
with the comment “The urine one can cherish when a lover’s body is at issue…”.11
Indeed, the magical strangeness of forbidden combinations can serve as an intimation of
the ganz andere – the ‘wholly other’, the numinous, the sacred – whose manifestations in
this world primarily inspire a sense of terror and awe.23 Art critic Jean Clair ventured
further in a personal vision of this paradoxical territory:

“We can talk about sacred painting, or a feeling of sacredness in painting, if we keep in
mind that the sacred is exactly the opposite of the saintly. Sacredness is not saintliness. The
saint brings together, the sacred is what divides. The saint is involved with, how shall I
say… a sort of foretaste of the delights of paradise. With the sacred, you never know if it’s
linked to heaven or to hell. The sacred is etymologically that which is both desirable and
repulsive. It’s both what one desires the most, what is most fascinating and yet taboo. The
sacred stimulates a desire for possession, but also repels you as belonging to the unclean
and the tainted. If we refer to this original definition – the old, primary meaning of sacred –
then yes, Balthus’s painting is concerned with the sacred. Artaud immediately realized that,
with Balthus, he was up against works that were both fascinating and repulsive. He once
called Balthus a painter who smelled of putrefaction, of carrion, with the whiff of epidemics
and catastrophes. He saw that, and that’s why he liked Balthus more than the provocative
tactics, which were quite superficial, of his Surrealist friends, who never went very far: they
were just images that shocked you initially, but which you grew tired of five minutes later.
That’s the difference between great art which reconnects with the sacred, and ‘imagery’ that
claims to be sacrilegious, and in doing so, goes back to being nothing more than profane
amusement.”24

Beksinski provides an additional perspective. “I quite simply have been trying from the
very beginning to paint beautiful paintings. Beautiful. Of course you may take that for
coquetry, and yet, it is the essential thing, the only thing that counts. [...] Additionally, the
beauty of a painting should not be confused with the beauty of the subject. For example, I
can imagine a beautiful painting which depicts a hanged person, and an awfully drab one
of Venus taking her bath.”25
 Works by both Beksinski and Malboeuf invite use of the term ‘Gothic’. As one
exponent observes of poetry and prose, “To be Gothic, there needs to be something ugly
in the beauty, or something beautiful amidst ugliness. A juxtaposition of the startling with
the mundane, the sacred with the profane. Gothic requires a certain eccentricity of phrase
or imagery or subject or mood, or of the writer him/herself.”26 Of course, such sentiments
are equally applicable to the visual arts. Given Malboeuf’s location in North Carolina, it
seems fitting to add Tennessee Williams’ description of Southern Gothic – that sub-genre
distinctive of the American south – as a style that captures “an intuition of an underlying
dreadfulness in modern experience.”27 Or, to quote one admirer’s response to Malboeuf’s
Epileptica, “the overall effect of the picture leaves a haunting impression that there is
something mysteriously wrong with our American suburban culture.”28

Muses and leitmotifs

An artistic predilection for young female models is nothing new, with most of the Old
Masters harbouring this preference. Such subjects epitomise the pre-eminent transition of
human life (that of child to adult) as it culminates in a form capable of the
complementary transition. In mythological terms, the adolescente develops into a newly-
made microcosm of the life-giving Earth.29 But while Balthus spoke mainly of a “sacred
eroticism”, it has been observed that his adolescent girls are, in the purest Sado-
Baudelairian tradition, “now victim, now torturer”.30 Echoes of this seem to infuse
Malboeuf’s young models, whose dreamy gazes transport the older male viewer past their
girl-next-door ’70s clothing and impossibly luxuriant hair to a paradoxical core in which
protectiveness vies with forbidden attraction. If at times Malboeuf’s wistful eye for
teenage girls seems to metamorphose into a fully-fledged mystery religion, we should
remember that his creative root resides in his own youth, and that each painting can be
seen as an attempt to valorize the joys and exorcise the demons first encountered in those
formative years. But risk remains the handmaid of honesty in such endeavours. Balthus,
for his part, quashed the recurring suggestions of impropriety in his work with the
declaration “I have only ever painted angels.”31
Malboeuf often intensifies the visual drama by placing his slender protégées in
alien or desolate settings where he can juxtapose physical extremes such as fire and snow.
The cyanosed lips of girls painted en grisaille hint at the transience of flesh and blood,
however beautiful – or is it perhaps just a trick of that mysterious blue Christmas light?
When Thanatos dominates, Malboeuf’s muses appear in hellish scenes that are more
Beksinskian nightmare than Balthusian dream. Calling such works “futuristic pre-
Raphaelite paintings corrupted by the forces of the darkside”,32 and acknowledging the
“biting admixture of religion and sexuality” in others,33 critic Linda Luise Brown aptly
observed that “there’s a repellent attraction to this work that’s compelling.”32
In a series of images, sometimes it is a recurring combination of seemingly
unrelated items that carries significance. Just as three elements – a girl, a cat and a mirror
– are repeatedly recruited by Balthus for his visual alchemy, three features are found
juxtaposed in some of Malboeuf’s more haunting works. The latter’s triad seems to
consist of a girl; a tower or cylinder of liquid, often containing a creature; and an
elongated or rigid object. The Freudian frisson takes a sinister turn as soon as we notice
that the container is usually shown with its contents leaking or spilled. Other paintings,
such as I Sing of a Maiden and Star-Spangled Girl, appear to tread the same perilous
ground more overtly.
Although crosses and crucifixions appear almost as fetish items in the work of
both Beksinski and Malboeuf, the two men are differentiated by the former’s avowed
lack of religious belief. Malboeuf’s Christian upbringing and faith are clear from his
writings,34 although his disavowal of Roman Catholicism35 may come as a surprise in
view of his fondness for incorporating its trappings into his art. For his part, Balthus was
a devout Catholic who identified painting with prayer,14 and claimed of his ostensibly
secular output that “everything I paint is religious.”31
Malboeuf’s blackened tree stumps, with their amputated branches, seem to have
grown in the same bleak forests as those of Caspar David Friedrich. Another recurring
motif in Malboeuf’s work is the use of idiosyncratic flash-cards – captioned icons from a
personal and seemingly inexhaustible Tarot deck – to adorn walls and other surfaces in
his tableaux. These mysterious cards seem to have something in common with the
certificates and diagrams of Pierre Roy’s The Metric System.36 While no doubt a
coincidence, the fusion of indoor/outdoor composition and surreptitious background
action in Roy’s painting (complete with its diminutive figure and distant fire) endow it
with a number of features that are characteristic of Malboeuf’s oeuvre.

Epilogue

Obviously the best way to experience any of these artists’ work is to witness their
paintings, preferably first-hand. Beksinski and Balthus have the advantage of
international renown, with books and films devoted to their lives and accomplishments.
Paintings by Balthus hang in major galleries worldwide, while collections of Beksinski’s
art are open to the public in the towns of Sanok and Częstochowa in Poland. A selection
of Malboeuf’s artwork is routinely on view at the Queen’s Gallery in Charlotte, North
Carolina. Artwork by all three artists can of course be viewed online.
Malboeuf is unique in offering non-visual dimensions to the experience of his
work, in that his output includes both music and writing. In particular, the dream-pop
songs composed and performed for his solo music project, Cowgirl in the Snow,37
complement his visual art and enhance the viewer’s appreciation of it. Truly, the whole is
more than the sum of its parts.
Let me conclude this essay with perspectives from my three long-suffering
subjects. First, from Malboeuf’s journal: “Ultimately, anyone who seriously creates art
can resign him/herself to being perpetually misunderstood by everyone. […] Misguided
educators, and indeed human nature, compel us to attempt to connect the dots and bring
meaning from the mysteries. But the great revelation is that the dots do not want to be
connected; they only want to be touched, gingerly.”7, 38 Next, the well-known
autobiography telegraphed to the Tate Gallery: “Begin: Balthus is a painter of whom
nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures. Regards. B.”3 And finally from
Beksinski, pithy to the last: “I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting.”39
References

1. Wikipedia entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Malboeuf

2. Artist’s statement at the BeinArt International Surreal Art Collective,
http://beinart.org/artists/danny-malboeuf/gallery/paintings/
3. de Rola, Stanislas Klossowski (2001) Balthus, Thames & Hudson, London, p.19
4. Banach, Wieslaw (2005) Foreword to Zdzislaw Beksinski, vol. 1, 3rd edn., Bosz, Poland,
p.15
5. Letters of Beksinski to Piotr Dmochowski, 27-29 October, 1985. Online at
http://www.dmochowskigallery.net/filmoteka.php?movie=1&text=1
6. Artist’s statement at the BeinArt International Surreal Art Collective,
http://beinart.org/artists/wolfgang-grasse/
7. From a discussion on the original Breed Art website, lost when the site was hacked in
Dec 2006.
8. deviantART journal entry Shayla, 17Apr 2004,
http://kolaboy.deviantart.com/journal/2238002/
9. Cowan, James R. (1998) The Fantastic Art of Beksinski, Morpheus International, Las
Vegas, pp.55 & 33
10. de Rola (2001), op. cit., Author’s note, p.24
11. Balthus de l’Autre Côté du Miroir, dir. Damian Pettigrew, Baal films, France, 1997.
Released with English subtitles on DVD as Balthus Through the Looking Glass, Arte
Video, 2007.
12. http://thinkexist.com/quotation/drawing_is_the_honesty_of_the_art-
there_is_no/219427.html
13. Cowan (1998), op. cit., p.28
14. de Rola (2001), op. cit., p.21-22
15. Online at http://www.dmochowskigallery.net/library.php
16. Néret, Gilles (2005) Balthus, Taschen, Cologne, p.37
17. Cowan (1998), op. cit., p.10
18. deviantART journal entry The Hermitage, 25 Aug 2005,
http://kolaboy.deviantart.com/journal/6321041/?offset=10
19. Cowan (1998), op. cit., p.24
20. deviantART journal entry Civitan, Kola-San? 28 Apr 2007,
http://kolaboy.deviantart.com/journal/12754720/?offset=30
21. Cowan (1998), op. cit., p.69
22. Néret (2005), op. cit., p. 8
23. Eliade, Mircea (1959) The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion (tr. Trask,
W.R.), Harcourt, San Diego & New York, p.8-10. One of the most influential thinkers
in this field, Mircea expanded Rudolf Otto’s central concept of the ganz andere (the
‘wholly other’, experienced as a frightening yet fascinating mystery) using
terminology consistent with that of Emile Durkheim, who defined the sacred as that
which is set apart and forbidden. Thus the dichotomy of sacred vs. profane is not
equivalent to that of good vs. evil but rather of truly real vs. unreal/illusion, or of
being/power and its antithesis. The sacred can actually be good or evil, as can the
profane. See Pals, Daniel (1996) Seven Theories of Religion, Oxford University Press,
New York, p.99
24. In the first of Three Balthusian Lessons, dir. Damian Pettigrew, 2007, special features
on the DVD of reference 11
25. Cowan (1998), op. cit., p.40 & 52
26. Submission guidelines for Southern Gothic,
http://riseconverge.blogspot.com/2007/11/submission-guidelines.html
27. Wikipedia entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Gothic
28. Comment by deviantART member johnnyjinx (http://johnnyjinx.deviantart.com/) in
2004, no longer accessible
29. Eliade (1959), op. cit., p.138-147; 166-172; 179-188
30. Néret (2005), op. cit., p.21-23
31. Néret (2005), op. cit., p. 54.
32. Brown, Linda L. (1995) Tales of the Darkside, Creative Loafing (Charlotte, North
Carolina), 9 Sep 1995, excerpted in reference 1
33. Brown, Linda L. (2002) New Art: the Real and the Invented, Creative Loafing
(Charlotte, North Carolina), Arts Feature 17 Apr 2002, excerpted in reference 1
34. For example, deviantART journals Red And Green, 22 Dec 2003
http://kolaboy.deviantart.com/journal/1566920/ and The Divine Moment, 30 Aug
2004 http://kolaboy.deviantart.com/journal/3243252/
35. deviantART journal Yak Butter Statues that Melt in the Sun, 23 Aug 2008
http://kolaboy.deviantart.com/journal/20103331/
36. Reproduced, for example, in Schurian, Walter (2005) Fantastic Art, Taschen,
Cologne, p.49
37. Online at http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=618034 ,
http://www.last.fm/music/Cowgirl+In+The+Snow ,
http://www.myspace.com/23573913
38. Comment to deviantART journal entry A Perfect World..., 25 Oct 2006,
http://kolaboy.deviantart.com/journal/10501666/?offset=0#comments
39. Cowan (1998), op. cit., p.70