Born in 1970, Marc Le Rest is a French-born artist who turned his back to a promising career within the Holy Church to dedicate himself to the Arts and the Kingdom of lingerie in Paris. Soon he swapped Paris for New York, where he became an acclaimed garden gnomes designer. Afterwards, he spent some time in Mexico and India. Le Rest also contributed as a textile designer to the collections of Hermès, Armani, J.P. Gaultier, Sonia Rykiel and Etro in Europe and some groups of the major home furnishing textile companies in the United States. This type of painting seeks to rediscover the Northern European portraits of the 16th and 17th C. by painters. It’s an alliance between minimalism formalist representation of the subject and an almost obsessive and baroque application to the figuration of the detail in the costumes. This pictorial inspiration is associated with another tradition in art history, animal painting. In the case of ‘Gypsies’, his collection of 2018, the monkeys are the models, dressed up in fine costumes, seated as fine Ladies and Gentlemen.