Artist Talk with Vidal Mouet and Tony Zhao: 4:30 - 6:00 pm

Please join us at C24 Gallery for a walkthrough with artists Vidal Mouet and Tony Zhao on Friday, July 24th at 4:30 PM as they discusses their current exhibtion Contact Points. Mouet and Zhao with reflect on their process and investigations of form, medium, and structure. 

The exhibition brings together two painters who, despite working in distinct methodologies, share a fundamental preoccupation with the painted object as a site of pressure and negotiation. Neither artist treats the canvas as a window into something else; for both painters, the work is complete in itself, resisting close readings and analysis looking past its surface. Meaning is produced through the work's construction: through texture, scale, edge, weight, repetition, and the physical relationship between the painting and the body that encounters it.

Vidal Mouet is a Mexican artist currently living and working in New York City. He primarily works in abstract painting, pulling inspiration from his everyday life, witnessing how objects from cardboard to stacked coffee cups interact with the space they inhabit. Mouet works exclusively with canvas, stretch bars, oil colors and space to create referential forms and shapes inspired by the real world. Despite operating within a classic painting vocabulary, Mouet's works push the limits of traditional 'painting', forcing viewers to contend with questions of what they are seeing as they engage with each work. 

Tony Zhao (b. 2002) is a New York based painter and designer whose work centers on texture as an emotional language. Operating between painting and printmaking, his process-driven practice foregrounds the physicality of paint, challenging the boundaries of material while playing with the legibility of image. Through layered, tactile compositions, Zhao distills the sensitivity of mundane, transforming painted surface into a site of resonance, where narrative emerges through gestures and touch. Tony Zhao's work is inspired by the sensibility of light and shadow. Through retrospective drawings, these moments of mundane are distilled into traces of passing gaze.