Felix Oliver        CV + Contact




‘Canopy’
Sutton Gallery - Project Space
Alongside Naoise Halloran - Mackay
8 - 29 August 2026    




In Canopy, images and structures are constructed to resemble familiar architectural forms while suspending their expected function. Windows, openings, enclosures and façades fall short of themselves. Detached from any complete structure, these openings suggest movement, visibility and access while withholding each in turn. A window promises a view elsewhere but refuses arrival, an entrance implies passage while remaining impassable. Canopy draws upon a recognisable architectural vocabulary only to subtly displace it. Familiar spaces become strangely misaligned, their internal logic skewed through repetition, flatness or interruption. What initially appears ordered gradually reveals itself as unstable, producing a persistent tension between recognition and operation. Architecture is staged rather than inhabited, becoming a vessel for associative imagery, half-remembered spaces and imagined interiors.

        Rather than offering fixed destinations, Halloran-Mackay and Oliver construct environments that remain deliberately unresolved. Incompleteness operates here not as absence, but as a generative condition, transforming architectural forms into spaces of projection and possibility. Their works invite intimacy while frustrating completion, sustaining a space between revelation and concealment. Together, the exhibition becomes an unfolding conversation of openings and closings, a landscape of partial thresholds where the familiar gives way to something dreamlike, elusive and just beyond reach.
Click here for an accompanying exhibition text “A Gateless Gate” by Hugh L. Magnus  
 

Felix Oliver
Inkwell, 2026
American white ash, American white oak, brush box, Tasmanian ash, Blackwood, spotted gum, Archival Inkjet pigment print
210 x 222 x 48cm

Available (Enquire)


Felix Oliver
Concertina, 2026
Blackwood, spotted gum, blackbutt
232 x 118 x 103cm


Available (Enquire)


Felix Oliver and Naoise Halloran- Mackay
Installation view - Felix Oliver (Left), Naoise Halloran- Mackay (Right)





Felix Oliver
Concertina, 2026
Detail



Felix Oliver
Petula, 2026
Inkjet pigment print, blackwood frame
125 x 92 x 7.5cm



Felix Oliver
Inkwell, 2026
Detail



Felix Oliver
Folly Scene, 2026
Inkjet pigment print, blackwood frame
64 x 64cm (framed)



Felix Oliver
Concertina, 2026
Detail



Felix Oliver
Concertina, 2026
Detail


Felix Oliver and Naoise Halloran- Mackay

Installation view - Felix Oliver (Right), Naoise Halloran- Mackay (Left)






Hugh L. Magnus
A Gateless Gate

Regret emerges smiling from the sea,
the sick sun slumbers underneath an arch 
        Charles Baudelaire, Recueillement

Before a picture represents anything, it tells us something about consciousness. Ductus (movement, flow) is a classical term originally used to describe rhetorical structure: applied to literary, artistic and architectural compositions, it indicates the path of the mind moving through a work. The distinctive architectures of Felix Oliver and Naoise Halloran-Mackay in Canopy invite such a reading, one in which constructed space transfigures and transcends the powers of eye and mind.

Architecture and figure have long been inseparable in art, from the sculpted caryatids of Classical (and Neo-classical) times to buildings’ deployment as framing devices in Gothic and Renaissance painting. For de Chirico, the presence of whose empty arcades can be felt in Halloran-Mackay’s intricate structures, “the open doors, arches and windows that accompany [Giotto’s] figures allow one to feel a presentiment of cosmic mystery.” The blankness of the empty frame—here, that of the house and the window—is supplanted by an oneiric reminder of that old aperçu; “the arch never sleeps.” There is always something present in this negative space; the invisible relations of force that bear structure, yes, but so too an engendering of the image’s self-awareness

The gestural, illocutionary qualities of architecture demand an impression or gesture in return; in these works it is the act of penetrating layered space. While we have those who followed Giotto to thank for linear perspective, the works in this show share more of a sensibility with the additive space pioneered by artists of the Dutch Golden Age—Vermeer and van Hoogstraten among others—whose meticulous interiors are that, in the words of their forebear Karel van Mander, “into which the eyes may plough”. Incidentally, this period also saw the development of marquetry as a trade, the ébénistes of the Low Countries fuelling a mania for inlaid wood across the palaces of Europe. Constructing seeing in this self-aware manner acts as a sort of visual trap, thematising a rhetorical, active looking. Trompe l’œil, the fabrication of illusory space, has no small part to play in this entrapment. Indeed, Lacan recounts the foundational narrative of the technique (the tale of two artists, Zeuxis and Pharrhasios, the former of whom is fooled by the latter’s painted veil) as suggesting “a triumph of the gaze over the eye”.

Yet in Canopy the veils are both painted and real. Organza shrouds and panes of glass complicate a reading that invariably prioritises obscuration as the object-cause of desire. How then can these works be navigated, the contradiction of spaces for moving through (with the eye or the body) that are by nature impassable? Walter Benjamin tells us that the interior, “for the private man, represents the universe.” Perhaps then containment, rather than movement, is the wellspring of space. The journey of architectonic exploration in Oliver and HalloranMackay’s work is testament to this, both artists undertaking a bringing-forth of space and image. The blank arch, that gateless gate, shapes our entry into the dream.

Hugh L. Magnus, July 2026