Personicx

5b presents Personicx, an artists book by Theo Christy. The publication focuses on a collection of A4 collages, prints, and drawings by the artist shown at 1:1 scalefacsimiles which maintain an uneasy tension between reality and the squashed surface of the screen.

Across each page, characters are introduced, reworked, and recastimposed over the exhibition documentation, text and checklist, and beneath the twisting silhouette of a ballerina.


These exploratory exercises were central to the development of a group of unboxing paintings included in When studying the world, the artist's debut solo exhibition at Charity, Glasgow in 2023.


A text by Ben Maxwell, titled The Terrifying Space of the Picture, accompanies the publication.


Dispossessed of our illusions, the planes of brown cease to describe the crisp surface of receding cardboard. Instead, they open out psychotically like arbitrary segments cropping the play of light over the churning surface of a vast pool of faecal sludge, incongruous highlights catching cracks in the ceilings of different caves, cropped by disgusted lines, or by the canvas edge, like the bottom left corner where a radial current threatens to spill out onto the wall below.
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