Safe Spaces

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present artist Henry Curchod’s solo project Safe Spaces at Paris Internationale 2023, Booth 2.3. Featuring the artist’s latest venture, the presentation showcases a series of large-scale paintings to investigate the notion of “safe space”, a term brought into the public discourse from the psychotherapist’s room. Safe Spaces metabolises Curchod’s subversive observations from daily encounters and his continued engagement with painterly perspectives to explore the concept of spatial barriers dominant in our everyday life––mainly the separation of “inside/outside” and transition between spaces–– as well as to question of “trust”, socially, culturally and politically.

In this presentation, Curchod’s multitudinal storytelling technique unfolds through his manoeuvring of spatial construction and perspectives, suggesting a non-static position between the insider and the outsider, crossing boundaries to contemplate the conformity nature of social norms. Stemming from the artist’s Kurdish-Iranian heritage and experiences living in different parts of the world, Glow (2023) and Recipe for success (2023) illuminate the sense of mobility and dynamism. Within the designated shallow space and parallelogrammical frames, the central figures are captured in the moments of physically trespassing wall-like barriers, indicating whimsical scenes of fleeing across different realms. Further accentuated by his striking colour palette and signature shading technique with oil sticks and charcoal, these give his paintings a filtered impression of faux naivety. Yet compelling as they are to a child’s portrayal of the world devoid of linear perspective, this same intense innocence is the guiding thread into multiple layers of sardonic allegories and metaphors that chronicle contemporary events. Notably, in Beginning of the end (2023), which captures a clownish figure handing out candies to a group of children at the corner of an alley, the painting is, in fact, specific in its reference to the situation in Mexico where drug cartels are recruiting young children into a life of crime.

Inspired by Persian miniature paintings, Curchod synchronises the crowded architecture of spaces and perspectives into one erratic, eclectic, and uncertain view. Much as a canvas is the revelatory space of an artist’s inner consciousness, each painting is a portal to an imagined realm for the viewer. The artist’s practice composes a unique fusion of narrative figuration and dry wit, coinciding with the interplay between various spatial treatments. This is evident in Tissue Session (2023), which, like many of his other paintings in the presentation, is a parable for the psychological disquietude we associate with living in contemporary society. Here, Curchod draws an uncanny likeness from the concept of “tissue meeting” —commonly referred to as an informal presentation of creative work to a client in the design and advertising industry— to a patient’s confession to a doctor in psychotherapy. The protagonist has no recognisable facial features, only to be seen as an anonymous soul revealing so much of his innate being that his organs are radically pouring into view. Curchod limns a cynical wordplay to the word ‘tissue’, a reference to both our bodily cells and that thing used to dry our tears. For what seems an intense and emotional scene, the practitioner in a white cloak sits unperturbed, stiffer than the seaweed curtains beside him, as the figure rips itself apart.

Safe Spaces carves out a site of visual experience filled with surprise and bewilderment where rich symbols, daily observations, and social phenomena intersect. Elaborating on the paintings’ disorienting perspectives, the presentation format stages its viewers in a self-conscious space. As we constantly recalibrate and negotiate with the arena of display, such adaptive response reconciles with our always-in-flux state of being.

Henry Curchod