Michael Bastow

Under an abundance of interlacing and colors, he tries to give the sensation of skin textures and architectures of women's bodies structured by light.

[5] At the beginning of the 1990s, his work was shown in public institutions: Stichting Veranneman in Kruishoutem in 1991, Les dix-huit ans d'expo du Cirque Divers at the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Liège in 1995,[6] Centro Cultural Recoleta de Buenos Aires in 1996.

He settled in a second studio near the Mont Ventoux in 1995 and, six years later, he bought the St Alexis chapel in Malaucène (Vaucluse) to restore and redecorate it.

Little by little, he transforms the chapel into a pictorial experience on the theme of the seven ages of life with the reappropriation of models of Byzantine icons and Africans masks.

Impressed by the portraits of the Qianlong Emperor and his wife the empress Xiao Xian painted by the Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, he decided to reuse the code of painting at the Chinese imperial court at that time (frontal portraits, with no modelling or chiaroscuro, attention to details and fabrics) to create an army of women, empresses, courtesans and warriors like the terracotta army in the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.