Image: Installation view of our most recent show at Green on Red Gallery, Xavier Theunis' solo exhibition, Bone In Skin On
Our most recent and final show at Green on Red Gallery’s Spencer Dock location was a great success and received great reviews from attendees, including art critic Aidan Dunne of the Irish Times. The Fall show, Bone In Skin On, was Xavier Theunis’ first solo show with the gallery and featured a number of the artist’s large-scale works.
Xavier Theunis is a French-Belgian artist who works in a range of media, including drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting. His work examines space and perspective through playful reinterpretations of still life, landscape, design, and architecture. While his practice is diverse, ranging from large-scale mixed media installations to surreal photographs of interiors, his recent interests revolve around the idea of “constructing” paintings. For his most recent series, Theunis has explored dimension and shape by applying offcuts and discarded pieces of vinyl to aluminum canvases and building his compositions off of the organic lines made by the layered pieces. By its very nature, this process means that the vinyl pieces do not perfectly piece together, leaving the different colours separated by slivers of white, which simultaneously mark difference between the fragments while uniting them into a mosaic-like paintings of colour.
For Bone In Skin On, Theunis dives further into ideas of repurpose and changed meaning by creating a spiral structure in the gallery in which his pieces were hung. The spiral is of course an artwork itself, meticulously made from the same shipping crates in which the works were transported. In this way, the crates change function from protective to aesthetic purpose, just as the pieces of vinyl change meaning from discarded fragments to fully realized compositions. By essentially creating a gallery within a gallery, Theunis invited attendees to interact with the maze-like construction and perceive the works and crate-spiral as components of a larger installation.
We are delighted that people enjoyed Theunis’ debut show and are particularly pleased with a positive, five star review from the Irish Times, which said of the show, “While the individual pieces he makes are enthralling, and incidentally labour-intensive, there’s no doubt that the environment he has created is just as much a part of the work. He is apparently a perfectionist who dwells on every aspect of a project, from the smallest detail to the entire package. Which is why it’s important to see the exhibition in the round, rather than, say, as a series of attractive images online.” Read the full review in the Irish Times here- https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/bone-in-skin-on-an-enthralling-exhibition-that-needs-to-be-seen-in-the-round-1.4061450
Xavier Theunis, vue d’atleier #22, Green on Red Gallery