Born in Paris in 1994, Margaux Compte-Mergier is a sculptor, performer, and author whose hauntingly hybrid creatures blur the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, the digital and the mythological. Based between Berlin and Paris, and with a background in the theory and practice of lanuage and the arts (EHESS, Paris), she is currently represented by RÍO & MEÑAKA gallery, and has exhibited widely across Europe and Mexico, with recent solo shows at Tignous Contemporary Art Center in Montreuil and Exgirlfriend Gallery in Berlin.

Margaux's practice is marked by a fascination with transformation, digital glitches, and the aesthetics of chance. She creates what she calls "monsters that hold together our contradictions”—tender and voracious beings made of resin, metal powders, and everyday detritus. As she herself pointed out during our conversation at her recent exhibition at ARCO Lisboa, "they are a bit creepy but also kinda cute". 

There are moments when the world pauses. When touch, memory, and spirit align in a single, quiet gesture. 

Nina Khemchyan, an artist whose hands have spent decades shaping the very clay of the earth, invites us into such a moment. Her latest work, UN JOUR AU PARADIS—“A Day in Paradise”—is a journey into the intimate: the earth beneath us, the material that holds our memories, and the sacredness of the process of creation itself.

Humorously horrific, colorfully grim, melancholically blatant, phantasmagoric and grotesque, to the point of looking nearly hallucinatory. The surreal paintings of Vukadin Filipović, a young Serbian artist, currently living and working in Vienna, are attractive and disturbing at the same time.

I stopped next to his works at Vienna Contemporary, and instantly dreamt away, wondering in the back of my mind: who are they, these creatures and those people? This cute doggie with terrifyingly empty blue eyes. This fluffy, soft beast with ridiculously long, bloody fangs. These young, exaggeratedly laid-back bohemian men; this elegant, sad woman with empty, red eye sockets. Where are they, and where am I?

So I decided to ask the artist himself.

Stephanie Lucchese. The Marble Faun. (Image courtesy: Stephanie Lucchese) Life starts with a woman. The Marble Faun by Stephanie Lucchese is a striking vision of transformation,...

In the busy heart of Buenos Aires, a child named Veronica was born. From the very start, she was enchanted by the city’s juxtaposition of grandeur and decay, where the monumental met the impermanent.

As Veronica grew, she became a seeker of fragments, gathering broken tiles from forgotten courtyards, shards of glass that glimmered like secrets, the remnants of stories left untold. The world spoke to her through these fragments, promising that within every crack lay a portal to new dimensions.

A symbolic triangle in the center of everything. The presence of the four and the square. The dominance of the green – the color of transition. The pinkish color of disgust. The trapped spirit in the form of a bird. Covered heads – like a symbol of losing freedom. The materialistic world with no chance for peace, the white flags are down. 

A mesmerising work by Ferdinand Dölberg. Should we scan it for the speckles of symbolism? Decode? Or just peacefully observe? 

There is a legend. Beautiful women lived as stars in the sky. Once in a while they descended to earth using woven chaguar ropes to eat fish caught by fishermen. Men discovered this and used birds to cut the ropes, trapping the celestial beauties on earth. So the women stayed. Not only they stayed, but continued weaving and passed on their heavenly knowledge to their daughters.

Clément Bataille’s art breathes a mystical, dreamlike tension, where sacred rites and childhood memories intermingle in silent figures and dark, reverent spaces. Each painting feels like a confined world barely holding its secrets, a reverent yet tender rebellion, both intimate and magnificent.

A historian by education, a painter and a ceramicist, Bataille likens his artistic process to the disciplined repetition of a mediaeval copyist monk. Influenced by Italian primitive art and Byzantine icons, his work often juxtaposes the structured beauty of these traditions with modern digital imagery.

Painting by Georg Baselitz. "Reiter Im Schnee" ("Rider in the Snow").

Moving through their studio, Kami Mierzvvinsk creates a story which each of us can interpret as their own: each brushstroke a quiet invocation, each canvas a portal to something just out of reach.

They paint from memory. But not from memories they could name. It is the memory of things felt but never seen, a whisper of the world beyond the senses, a place the soul had known before the body took shape.