MARCEL VIDAL

Marcel Vidal’s paintings are marked by their controlled brushwork, layering oil on linen with delicacy and precision, creating moments of familiar yet unsettling beauty. They are refined and restrained, incarnating brightly lit fragments of photographs, digital images. Hands move and gesticulate through the exhibition; bracing in delicate clasps, blocking identities, reaching towards the viewer. Vibrant colours punctuate the exhibition, a neon hat on an elusive figure, glossy green monstera leaves, the royal blue of a cropped shoulder. Vidal’s minimal compositions are severely cropped to reveal only a sliver of their subject, using ambiguity to frustrate interpretation, all the while inviting our curiosity.

“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 the frame.

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 ****

Marcel Vidal (b.1986, Dublin) has had solo exhibitions at Kerlin Gallery (2021), The Dock Arts, Carrick on Shannon (2018), Temple Bar Gallery & Studios (2017/2018) and Basic Space (2013) and a two-person exhibition with Paul Hallahan at The Complex, Dublin (2020). Selected group exhibitions include The Coach House, Dublin Castle (2025); Draíocht Gallery, Dublin (2023); Butler Gallery; Golden Fleece Award: 21 Years, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Ireland (both 2022); Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; 6th Biennial of Painting, Zagreb (both 2021); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2025, 2023, 2022, 2019); National Gallery of Ireland; Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin (both 2019). Vidal has been a recipient of Fire Station Artist Residential Studio Award and the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award, and the winner of The Hennessy Craig Award (2019).

Courtesy Kerlin Gallery