Selected text
No longer in the future
Text by Saša Bogojev
30.04.2026
https://the-unibrow.com/daily-brows/no-longer-in-the-future
We have seen paintings of multiple bodies. We’ve seen them clashing, morphing, and standing alone. We’ve seen them rendered with 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
Contemporary art issues
Text by Julien Delagrange
28.04.2026
https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/theo-viardin-orphaned/
On view until May 15 at Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna, Orphaned, Théo Viardin’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, brings together eleven oil paintings made over the past two years. It is a strange and gripping ensemble—biblical, profane, and knowingly out of joint with time. If Viardin’s work has long staged catastrophic visions populated by anthropomorphic figures that feel at once alien, human, and faintly liturgical, these new paintings shift the tension elsewhere. The future still hovers nearby, certainly, but the real pressure comes from painting’s memory of itself: from the way the present compulsively carries fragments of its own pictorial past, whether it wants to or not.
Viardin describes the title Orphaned in similarly double terms. The paintings, he says, were born from crisis—out of the anguish of discovering the extent of damage humanity has inflicted on the living world and on the climate. They emerge from a sense that the great powers once available to painting, and perhaps to spiritual imagination more broadly, still exist as inheritance but no longer arrive with their old certainty intact. “We are kind of condemned to have this heritage without having the sense of this heritage,” he notes. Yet he does not frame that condition only as loss. There is also a strange freedom in it, because inheritance without instruction leaves room for recomposition. That tension—between mourning and reinvention—runs through the whole exhibition.
The paintings themselves are hard to shake off. Viardin’s anthropomorphic figures stand at the center of his practice: half creature, half human, archaic and futuristic at once, as if something from ancient ritual had wandered into an afterimage of the Anthropocene. Viardin alternates masterfully rendered hands and feet, painted with a precision that borders on pictorial bravado, with passages of looser, more unstable improvisation in the surrounding bodies. These fragments of near-virtuosic control feel almost like a tour de force, little demonstrations that yes, he can paint like that if he wants to—and perhaps that is precisely why he lets the rest dissolve, slide, and destabilize. One gets the feeling that Viardin knows exactly how much structure a painting needs before it can afford to begin falling apart. They are held together by sheer pictorial force: vibrant reds, deep blues, hazy purples, passages of exacting control set against areas of fluid improvisation.
Despite the theological allusions, the paintings hold no clear narrative or stable iconography. In Sacred Study, Green (2026), the composition recalls Bellini, but the green ceremonial cloth at its center acts less like a symbolic intervention than like a digital glitch that has somehow wandered into devotional painting. In Study for a Revelation (2026), a lamb enters the picture with unmistakable spiritual charge, even if it does not support any clear iconographic role. So how can its presence feel so right and poignant? In Post-apocalypse, II (2026), a cross appears as negative space—an emptied, corrupted echo of Fra Angelico’s Mocking of Christ. The artist believes every painting is, in a way, a self-portrait, which must make this piece his own crucifixion—a certain self-flagellation through painting as a devotional practice in which the artist spares neither us nor himself. In the end, these paintings seem to grasp the viewer by the throat and hold on a little longer than expected. They consume us, not vice versa.
The press release identifies mourning as the exhibition’s central theme: mourning for a meaningful spiritual world from which such figures once emerged, and mourning too for the loss of stable symbolic structures able to contain these spiritual urges and desires. Yet the works do not settle into lament. They push toward something active, even physical, visceral: a kind of orphaned vitality, in which mourning becomes a way of staying open to renewed forms of faith, material and painterly alike. Not nostalgic, perhaps slightly iconoclastic. Yet, capable of carrying humanity’s ancient self-destructive desire for the end of days and un-hoped-for salvation. So yes, Orphaned deals with apocalypse, inheritance, collapse, spiritual loss, the Anthropocene, and the exhausted remains of painting’s former authority—which is a fairly packed itinerary. Théo Viardin paints as if these problems are not ideas but conditions. The result is a body of work that feels deeply historical and thoroughly unprotected. A bit like us, unfortunately. Only better painted.
Neuralgic Ghost Pain
Text by Axel Fried - 09.04.2026
https://axel-fried.com/neuralgic-ghost-pain
The ensemble presented by Théo Viardin in Orphaned is a strange one — biblical, profane, furiously anachronistic. Though we already knew of the young French painter's penchant for projecting his catastrophic visions and the worried masses of his alien morphologies into the realm of contemporary figuration, it is no longer in the future, but in the compulsive remembrance that the present maintains of its own pictorial memory, that the tension of his latest canvases lies.
For his second solo exhibition at the Kandlhofer Gallery, the artist presents a body of eleven paintings created over the past two years, in which he reflects, as a painter, on the future of religious figuration in an increasingly aporetic world. Painted in oil, alternating successively layers of paint and glazes energised by confident formal improvisations, the canvases are composed as a series of events, emergencies and urgencies that respond to one another and unfold ceaselessly before the viewer’s eyes. The most striking formal innovations in the treatment of pictorial space lie in the proliferation of rugged zones – expanses of gold, reddish fumaroles, incandescent lava flows, trivially smeared ochre-coloured washes – spreading from one canvas to another like charming malware, creating, through their resonances, a great tension within the whole. The paintings do not depict specific scenes, but rather convey the possibility of a more general event: some sort of gigantic end-of-the-world celebration – liturgical carnival where the echoes of ancient sacred forms manifest, in the mode of apparition, their post-apocalyptic becoming. Another striking effect resulting from the artist’s latest major technical choices, particularly noticeable in the four largest canvases, is the use of much more blended and smoother brushstrokes, which fluidity tends to lend the painting a certain virtual quality. In Sacred Study, Green (2026), whose strict composition recalls that of Bellini, the green ceremonial cloth evokes less a symbolic threshold than a screen display error bar. To the fleshy masses that already placed Théo Viadin within the modernist lineage of meat painters, effects of bit rot and glitches bring the painter’s pictorial programme closer to that of software saturated by an overflowing hard drive in some apocalyptic setting, endlessly iterating new frozen images from the heaviest fragments of his former files.
Although he has never been a storyteller, Théo Viardin now seems to be turning definitively away from narrative to devote himself fully to a form of retinal painting that finds its logic solely in the sensations it evokes. Despite their titles with their strong theological overtones, is that the paintings presented here have no ‘sense’; or, at least, not in the traditional iconographic sense of the term: the signs do not refer to any higher spiritual reality; the visible refers to nothing other than itself. The virgins, mystical lambs and erinyes appear on the canvas like extras passing across the set of a film in which they do not play, and reappear from one panel to the next in the hallucinatory mode of an acid re-trip. In this respect, Orphaned seems to fully realise the Deleuzian pictorial programme, by wresting the figure from the realm of figuration – that is, from the realms of narration and illustration – so that it exists only in the mode of pure sensation, experienced and serving to make one experience it in a movement that blurs the medium of the painting and its viewer. Deprived of any coherent belief system, the liturgical figures confront the present in the manner of a sensory homunculus – veritable open-air nervous system condemned to experience, alone or with the support of the group, the metaphysical storms and ultra-retinal torments of our twenty-first century.
Is there any grace to be found here? Post-Apocalypse II – the largest canvas in the exhibition, is articulated around the negative space of a cross, darkened by the acid-hued shimmer of a mist, from which floating hands sprout randomly, in a corrupted version of Fra Angelico’s Mocking of Christ. Nevertheless, the ferocity and vitalistic resolve with which the painter commits himself body and soul to the exercise of painting leave no sign of despair. Orphaned takes mourning as its central theme: the loss of a meaningful spiritual world from which these symbolic figures emerged, figures that still survive like great, silent animals; but also the horizon of this loss: the hope of a renewed, material faith for which the act of painting might once again serve as a kind of vehicle. Something has died in the history of images, but something nervy seems to have been born from this death, and these two play a four-handed melody that the painter manages to capture. The entire tension of the exhibition – its entire formal, rhythmic and compositional logic, lies in this contradictory dual movement of mourning and its acceptance: accepting to let go and refusing to let go, conceding to letting it disappear and refusing to let it disappear. To this struggle must be added another, more pressing one, that of the sensuous against its own degeneration ; a decline against which Francis Bacon already warned,, in a century far less bulimically iconophagous than our own: ‘There is a part of the nervous system that can only be reached through painting, and if that part dies, no one will want to paint it anymore. ’ The visceral attraction exerted by Théo Viardin’s canvases may have something to do with this. Even in grief, even wandering in the twilights of idols, a few orphaned sensations of painting remain very much alive. Persisting like the neuralgic pain of a phantom limb, something sacred still seems to survive in the experience of painting.
Axel Fried, 2026
“Enigma” :
Le freak Mélancolique
Text by Thibault Bissirier - 17.07.2024
https://thesteidz.com/2024/07/17/theo-viardin-exposition-paris-galerie-pact/
Pour sa première exposition à Paris, Théo Viardin (né en 1992) investit les murs de la galerie PACT et dévoile une variation sur le thème du Sphinx. En six grands formats, le jeune peintre déploie son univers peuplé de mutants humanoïdes, portant à notre attention la question de l’altérité et du devenir humain.
Que sont ces créatures, appesanties d’humeurs maussades, cousines des silhouettes disloquées de Picasso, des colosses androgynes de Michel-Ange, des cruautés difformes de Bacon ? De quel Tartare sont-elles donc remontées, ces chimères désolées, dont les étreintes dolentes caressent des épaules basses ? L’œuvre de Théo Viardin est résolument queer, au sens premier et ouvert du terme. Elle fraye dans les eaux troubles de l’anormal et du bizarre. Du monstrueux aussi. Mais qu’est-ce que cela veut dire ?
Si le « monstrum » latin renvoie aux événements extraordinaires, aux signes visibles d’une volonté des dieux, le « monstre » moderne, lui, distingue les êtres dont l’apparence ou le comportement s’écartent de la norme. Il y a des monstres de l’imagination et des monstres de la nature, mais qu’ils soient du côté du prodige ou du « freak », ils sont toujours ce qui résiste à la compréhension et ce qui s’oppose à la règle. C’est dans l’altération que se forge leur altérité. Pour le dire autrement, ils sont le défectueux plus que le différent. Voilà sans doute ce qui fascine et effraie le plus, cette familiarité, cette presque-humanité qui vient défier l’ordre attendu des choses.
Les titres de ses œuvres l’indiquent sans équivoque, la créature que Théo Viardin dépeint, c’est le Sphinx, celui que croise Œdipe et qui porte l’énigme. À la question qu’il pose, il faut reconnaître l’homme. Mais quel homme ? Qu’a-t-on de si différent de la bête informe, avec nos quatre jambes le matin, puis deux l’après-midi et trois le soir ? Il y a bien du monstre dans l’humain et c’est cela qu’Œdipe doit apprendre. Mais saura-t-il se reconnaître ? Quelque chose est là, suspendu, une vérité qui ne parvient pas tout à fait à prendre forme, ni à percer le silence. En attendant, le Sphinx reste muet.
« Je m’adresse à vous en tant que singe humain d’une nouvelle ère. » Dans son discours devant l’École de la Cause Freudienne de France (« Je suis un monstre qui vous parle », 2020, Grasset) le philosophe queer et trans Paul B. Preciado fait du monstre encagé la métaphore pour exprimer la lutte contre les oppressions, la marginalisation et le contrôle des corps « mutants », c’est-à-dire de genre non binaire. Selon lui, si le monstre ne parle jamais, c’est parce qu’on lui en refuse le droit, que l’on parle à sa place. D’une sensibilité troublante et dure, ce texte résonne étrangement avec cette galerie de Sphynx mutiques, dont les corps non-conformes, mutants eux-aussi, nous apparaissent moins effrayants que vulnérables, et en un sens, porteurs d’espoir. Ne sont-ils pas la vision d’un devenir qui accueillerait enfin l’altérité, plutôt que de la réprimer ? S’il y a du monstre dans l’humain, Théo Viardin nous montre surtout combien il y a de l’humain dans le monstre. Lui aussi aime, lui aussi pleure. Nous parlions d’épaules basses : si nous les consolions ?