Marcel Vidal

Golden Fleece Award

Marcel Vidal received a BA in Fine Art (Painting) from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin in 2009 and has a three-year membership studio at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios from 2018 to 2021. He creates paintings and sculptures that are often combined in unsettling ephemeral installations.

His work often starts with a digital image which is materialised physically and rendered with traditional techniques in oil on watercolour: a painting. He then works intuitively with collected materials hoarded in his studio – often discarded hardware/construction materials – to devise volatile architectural sculptures and environments. These sometimes act as spaces within which his paintings and sculptural objects can be staged. He is interested in the failure and impossibility of representation within our hyper-saturated contemporary image culture, using images sourced from the internet and personal photographs as a way of isolating gesture and explicating confusion through an array of traditional art-making materials and industrial processes. The dichotomy that exists between the seemingly gentle aesthetic of his painting, the brutal aesthetic of his sculptures and their respective visual vocabularies is central to his work.

Marcel Vidal applied for a Golden Fleece Award to cover the costs involved in running a studio and to buy himself the time required to research and develop a major new body of work scheduled for exhibition in 2020. He will also diversify his palette of materials, experimenting with new equipment processes and media, including bronze, resin, cast plaster and concrete.