Kerlin Gallery is pleased to announce
blue moon shadow
an exhibition of new painting by Marcel Vidal.
Hand and plant, 2025,
oil on linen
90 x 70 cm / 35.4 x 27.6 in
"Drawing from personal photographs, online archives, and restaged snapshots, I work across personal and impersonal narratives, blurring the lines of authorship and subject matter.
Painting offers an intimate, material engagement. Through cropping and omission, I fragment context and interrogate how images construct narrative and meaning. Gesture and posture may read as intimate, performative, or controlling, depending on their placement within theframe. Cropping becomes a compositional strategy that generates ambiguity rather than resolution.
The images hold partial figures, coded gestures, and authority, hands gripping folders, torsos framed by microphones, bodies cut by edges of clothing and light. What might otherwise register as descriptive detail becomes the primary subject of the image. These elements act as carriers of social coding, conveying information about authority and interaction while remaining open to interpretation.
The work explores how meaning is constructed, altered, and continuously negotiated through images, gesture, and composition.”
Marcel Vidal
about the artist
Marcel Vidal
b. 1986, Dublin, Ireland
Marcel Vidal makes paintings and sculptures. Quietly disarming and unsettling us with an ominous beauty, Vidal’s paintings are marked by their controlled brushwork, layering oil on linen with delicacy and precision. They are refined and restrained, incarnating brightly lit fragments of photographs or digital images: unidentified figures seem caught by flashbulbs, and hold their arms in defensive barriers; glossy foliage catches the light before retreating into darkness; distinguished hands are frozen mid-clap. Vidal’s minimal compositions are severely cropped to reveal only a sliver of their subject, using ambiguity to frustrate interpretation, all while inviting our curiosity.