Blue moon shadow

Marcel Vidal makes paintings and sculptures. Quietly disarming and unsettling us with an ominous beauty, Vidal’s paintings are marked by their controlled brushwork, layering oil on linen with delicacy and precision. They are refined and restrained, incarnating brightly lit fragments of photographs or digital images: unidentified figures seem caught by flashbulbs, and hold their arms in defensive barriers; glossy foliage catches the light before retreating into darkness; distinguished hands are frozen mid-clap. Vidal’s minimal compositions are severely cropped to reveal only a sliver of their subject, using ambiguity to frustrate interpretation, all while inviting our curiosity. Vidal’s sculptures, meanwhile, encompass contrasting and combative textures and materials. Chains, spikes and pest-prevention devices are rigged up for attack or defence, echoing the hostility of urban space and inner-city infrastructure. In Vidal’s most recent work, sculptural assemblages have expanded outwards into more immersive environments, entering a dialogue with the history, architecture and symbolism of the spaces they inhabit. Visually arresting, these sculptural environments create a playful tension between the organic and the constructed, the threatening and fetishistic, the vital and the macabre. Marcel Vidal has had solo exhibitions at Kerlin Gallery (2021), The Dock Arts, Carrick on Shannon (2018), Temple Bar Gallery & Studios (2017/2018) and Basic Space (2013) and a two-person exhibition with Paul Hallahan at The Complex, Dublin (2020). Selected group exhibitions include The Coach House, Dublin Castle (2025); Draíocht Gallery, Dublin (2023); Butler Gallery; Golden Fleece Award: 21 Years, Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Ireland (both 2022); Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; 6th Biennial of Painting, Zagreb (both 2021); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2025, 2023, 2022, 2019); National Gallery of Ireland; Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin (both 2019). Vidal has been a recipient of Fire Station Artist Residential Studio Award and the Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award, and the winner of The Hennessy Craig Award (2019).