NEW YORK, NY.- C24 Gallery presents Contact Points, a two-person exhibition of works by Tony Zhao and Vidal Mouet. 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.
Mouet takes inspiration from the world around him: Cardboard boxes, stacked coffee cups, and objects caught mid-use become departure points for paintings that hover between representation and form. Working with canvas, stretcher bars, and oil, he translates the contour, volume, and balance of ordinary objects into forms that resist easy categorization. His works look like paintings and behave like objects, holding the familiar in tension with their own material presence. The painting never disappears into the image; it remains an object occupying the viewer’s space.
Zhao operates between painting and printmaking, constructing surfaces that bear the weight of their own making. His work does not illustrate a process but embodies one, each layer recording a decision, gesture, and moment of contact between material and hand. Drawing from the everyday, he creates compositions that are tactile before they are pictorial: you feel them before you read them. Marks appear transferred, embedded, obscured, or partially recovered, allowing the surface to function as image, record, and material event. The boundary between painting and print remains productively unstable, moving the viewer between recognition and sensation.
Placed together, Zhao’s and Mouet’s practices establish a dialogue between surface and structure, accumulation and reduction, touch and recognition. Zhao builds meaning through layered material contact, while Mouet translates the spatial logic of ordinary objects into the physical language of painting. In both, the artwork emerges through an encounter between material, image, and body. Contact Points locate painting precisely within that encounter: not as a fixed category or passive surface, but as an active object whose meaning is produced through the pressures it contains and the relationships it creates.
