We have seen paintings of multiple bodies. We’ve seen them clashing, morphing, and standing alone. We’ve seen them rendered w precision or constructed from gestures, and we’ve seen them appear or disappear from void-like environments. So even though none of these elements are particularly groundbreaking, the way Theo Viardin yields them still makes his new body of work so gripping. Comprising his solo debut Orphaned with Galerie Kandlhofer, they are as gorgeous as they are disturbing, calming as they’re agitating, familiar as they’re entirely new and alien.
The first thing that strikes you about these new paintings (besides the sturdy gaze and uncanny appearance of the protagonists) is the vibrant color choices and the way those energize otherwise fairly static images. After a few years of working w a restricted, almost exclusively monochrome palette, Viardin recently shifted gears towards vibrant, oversaturated hues and activated his visuals. As an exceptional colorist, he uses dominant blues and reds to pierce the scenes, adding to their emotion, structure, and depth. And this depth is conveyed with an almost classical chiaroscuro that never seems to settle, and keeps slipping into anything from merely primed, underpainted passages to explosive gestural crescendos.
For Viardin, the finished painting, the object, is not what is valuable, but the process through which it came to life. During that process, the artist channels his life experience through his tools and medium, leaving marks and building sections that correspond to the moment. And I personally enjoy how obvious this is in his work, with finely rendered sections morphing into ab-ex passages, just as seamlessly as his protagonists morph into one another.
“I want the painting to be an accurate depiction of my experience of life,” Viardin mentions. For him, life is a conglomerate of "different strands and organisms" that make it up, and, if successful, painting is the same. So rather than looking at the protagonists in his images as figures, singular subjects, or even bodies, they are actually parts of the painting’s own body itself. —Saša Bogojev
