Summer, autumn, winter. Painted in the year 2000, the slow chromatic departure of human life. From the warmth of the last breath, to the cold democracy of the earth.

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Rigor Mortis began as a technical challenge — an attempt to master the full spectrum of human skin, from living warmth to the gradual absence of colour. It became something else entirely. Claude MarQuis conceived two parallel triptychs, male and female, each tracing the same quiet arc: a figure laid in an open field, still and unhurried, while the landscape shifts season around them and the flesh slowly surrenders its palette.

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The work carries the weight of a private reckoning. Behind the clinical premise — the meticulous study of skin draining to celadon, to grey-green, and finally to the deep earth tones of late decomposition — lies an elegy. Painted nearly a decade after witnessing the death of a close friend, the series refuses the sentimentality usually attached to mourning. Instead, it observes. It renders. It insists that the body, even in its dissolution, deserves to be looked at directly.

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The four models who participated — three women and his boyfriend at the time — offered MarQuis not only their forms but their trust in the gravity of the subject. Their willingness to lie still and be imagined into aftermath lends the series its strange and quiet tenderness.

 

One of the male nudes is now in the permanent collection of the Ottawa Art Gallery, acquired through The Grotto: The Bill Staubi Collection.