Silverfish - Marcel Vidal
Marcel Vidal makes paintings and sculptures. He graduated from the National College of Art and Design in 2009 and works intuitively with a variety of materials, constructing distinctive sculptures that often stage and frame his paintings.
Marcel's approach to sculpture and its assembled chaos and combative insistence is strongly contrasted by his paintings made in oil and watercolour. Vidal's paintings are restrained, often withholding information, through rigorous cropping in an attempt to frustrate interpretation. The convergence of these two modes of production and
their aesthetic contrast is what interests him.
For this solo exhibition, Marcel's work was shown in a gallery, which overlooks the trees of the neighbouring estate of Hatley Manor. He is interested in the failure and impossibility of representation within the hyper- saturated image culture of today and uses imagery sourced from already existing circulating images and personal photography as a way to isolate gesture and explicate confusion through an array of traditional art making materials and industrial processes. He also values images that might resonate with something overtly political and unstable to the more mundane and pedestrian, for example a doughnut, or the leaf of a plant.
The process of exhibition making is made visible and questioned through the diversity of materials used. The work invites the viewer to not only considers the unstable situation that the objects create within the gallery but through this choreography of objects to consider the wider context of the increasingly unstable times that we live in. The work invites the viewer to not only consider the unstable situation that the objects create within the gallery but through this choreography of objects to consider the wider context of the increasingly unstable times that we live in.
"The work often starts with a digital image which is materialised physically and rendered with traditional techniques in oil or watercolour, a painting. I then work intuitively with collected and hoarded materials in my studio, devising anarchic architectural sculptures, that often stage and frame paintings and objects. These volatile assemblages are built from hardware materials, strips of wood, zinc plated bolts, castor wheels, spray paint, expanding polyurethane foam, string, feathers, fur pelts, deer hooves and suggest a function.
My paintings are restrained, withholding information, through rigorous cropping in an attempt to frustrate, displace and elude direct interpretation. These processes produce objects that create a dichotomy between what the seemingly gentle aesthetic of the paintings convey versus the visceral and brutal aesthetic of the sculptures. My Paintings and Sculptures are interdependent, in dialogue.
The spatial and material dichotomy produced between the different visual vocabularies of the work is a strategy to invite the viewers to question the established readings and interpretations predominant in art history and contemporary art." Marcel Vidal