Théo Viardin: Orphaned

Opening Reception:
Thursday, 9 April 2026
6 - 9 PM

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 these 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 exhibition at Galerie Kandlhofer, the artist presents a series of 11 paintings created over the last two years, in which he reflects, as a painter, on the future of the religious figurative tradition in an increasingly aporetic world. The most striking formal innovations in the treatment of pictorial space include the proliferation of uneven areas — flat patches of gold, reddish fumaroles, ochre atmospheric washes applied in a trivial manner — which spread from one canvas to the next like malicious virus, creating, through infection, a degenerative coherence within the whole body of work. Although he has never been a story teller, Théo Viardin now seems to be turning away entirely from the path of narration to devote himself fully to a phenomenological painting that finds its logic solely in the sensations it provokes. What is painted in the picture is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but rather as it is experienced as undergoing a particular sensation. In this respect, Orphaned seems to fully realise the Deleuzian pictorial programme: stripped of all coherent theological systems, the liturgical figures no longer exist as signs, but as sensory homunculi abandoned to the metaphysical mists and retinal inconsistencies of the present spectral orphans of the ages, left on the threshold of the 21st century, one might say, to paraphrase Peter Schjeldahl’s words regarding Willem de Kooning’s final canvases. Is there any salvation to be found here?

Post Apocalypse II – the largest canvas in the exhibition – is organised around the negative space of a cross, darkened by the acid moiré of a mist, from which floating hands spring forth randomly, as in a corrupted version of Fra Angelico’s Mocking of Christ. Here, the possibility of an answer to Caillois’s question seems to take shape: if anything akin to a sacred feeling still survives in painting, it persists only in the nerve-racking mode of phantom pain.

Excerpt from a text by Axel Fried