New York, NY - C24 Gallery presents Palimpsest, a two-person exhibition bringing together oil and acrylic canvases by Fidelis Joseph and Juan Manuel Salas. Grounded in the material logic of accumulation and erasure, this exhibition examines how images outlive their original context, taking into consideration quiet moments of daily life and collapsing the temporality of the canon.
Fidelis Joseph (Nigeria, 1989) draws from an archive of collected memories, photographs of friends and family, and online images, treating each source with equal weight. For Joseph, a stranger's face discovered on the internet can carry the same potential as an intimate portrait; what matters is how each image links our human condition. His subjects emerge not through declaration but through accumulation; each work begins as a question that the process itself answers.
Joseph's oils resist completion as a formal principle. Figures trail off into exposed canvas. Compositions are cropped and abstracted, withholding as much as they reveal. These are deliberate absences. Fragmentations mirror how experience actually arrives-in glimpses and partial revelations, not resolved pictures. The mark-making is careful and considered. Beneath the unease that runs through the work, a quality of attention persists. To look closely is to feel that these subjects, however obscured, are held with care.
Juan Manuel Salas (Mexico, 1992) builds each canvas as a shifting composition, layering and dissolving images until the surface becomes a record of its own making. Gestures drawn from Roman frescoes, archaeological textures, and fragments of digital culture occupy the same plane, but for Salas, this juxtaposition does not resolve into a unified image so much as suspend competing temporalities.
His works prioritize the persistence of materiality, as each vignette is mediated through veils of pigment, allowing each moment to sink beneath the surface and reemerge in altered form. Rather than declare itself, meaning in Salas' paintings accumulates, inviting the viewer to contend with ideas that shift between legibility and latency.
Across the practices of Fidelis Joseph and Juan Manuel Salas, the image is not fixed but contingent. It is shifting, overlapping, and deliberately unresolved. Both artists operate with an archival sensibility, attending to fragments that are incomplete, anonymous, or easily overlooked. Joseph's partially rendered figures appear and recede simultaneously. Salas constructs his paintings through stratified layers that alternately conceal and disclose. Earlier marks resurface with quiet persistence. Instead of resolving into clarity or completion, the works sustain multiple temporalities at once. Like memory itself, they remain unstable-continually in flux and never fully settled.
