Galerie Kandlhofer is pleased to present at the Focus On the exhibition Madly meeting logically in this hour. by  Franco Andrés, opening on Friday, 11 September 2026. The exhibition will be on view from 15 September to 17 October 2026 at Galerie Kandlhofer.

Madly meeting logically in this hour. is about magic and mating. The title references Section IV of Hart Crane’s Voyages, which captures the complexity of love and its entanglement with time, embodiment, and the carnal.

Drawing on the seething psychological environments of Francis Bacon, the turbulent brushwork, intense color, and distorted forms of Chaïm Soutine, and the history of still-life butchery found in the work of Annibale Carracci and Rembrandt, Andrés brings this art historical foreground into conversation with the excruciating pressures of contemporary life, shaped by rapid technological change, wealth extraction, social isolation, and increasing precarity.

Underpinned by desire, transformation, and an understanding of the important role the shadow plays, Andrés’s work invites an intimate psychological experience: an excavation sparked by loosened, slightly abstracted images rendered as if viewed only by candlelight. These images pull one into oneself and allow the inside to turn out.

Working with leather, literal skin, Andrés applies paint so that it seeps into the material rather than resting on the surface—a fusion of pigment with substrate, a bruise. A rib cage splayed open and light bursts.

The exhibition continues Andrés’s interest in textures and surface exploration and marks his first return to working with porcelain since 2019. All the paintings carry a cool green tone, creating the feeling of otherworldly play—something alien, real, and hyper-real.

Madly meeting logically in this hour. calls our attention to the wreathing of the divine, the human, and the shadow.

- Text by DJ Hellerman

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About the artist:

Andrés was included in Galerie Kandlhofer’s 2025 curated by exhibition and this is his first solo presentation with the gallery and in Vienna.

Franco Andrés (b. 1978, Miami, FL) is an artist working across painting, sculpture, and ceramics. He holds a B.F.A. in sculpture from Santa Fe University of Art and Design and an M.F.A. in Studio Arts from Syracuse University, completed in 2020. Born and raised in Miami, he currently lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. He uses traditional mediums—oil on linen and ceramic sculpture—combined with repetition to evoke a sense of longing, remembrance, and the fragility of perception. His paintings are built around a consistent vocabulary of recurring motifs and partially legible figures that seem to hover between presence and absence. These elements emerge and dissolve across the canvas, not to tell a story, but to mirror the unstable, subjective nature of memory itself. Rather than referencing digital reproduction, Andrés’ use of repetition aligns with psychological recall—his paintings function as memory palaces, where each image becomes a spatial container for emotional and mental resonance. Franco Andrés’ sculptural assemblages are characterized by rich textures and surfaces—incorporating materials like wax, fur, feathers, soil, and charred wood—that create finishes both sumptuous and visceral. His work navigates the space between the organic and the constructed, where materials take on a life of their own and notions of authorship become fluid.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China; Lacuna Projects in London, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY; the Olive Tjaden and Experimental Galleries at Cornell University; SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico; Icebox Projects in Philadelphia, PA; and Spring Break Art Fair in New York City. He was a post-graduate fellow at the Santa Fe Art Institute and presented the solo outdoor project A Situation for Open Possibilities in collaboration with the New Mexico Museum of Art during the 2016–17 season.