Andrew Agutos: Words & Paintings solo exhibition

LONDON, 10 August 2026—The exhibition includes eight paintings and texts made during Andrew Agutos’s London residency, ranging from intimate works on canvas to monumental unstretched canvases pinned loosely to the wall. Throughout the series, Agutos combines acrylic, photographic image transfer, found material, oil and oil stick, overlaying images with gesture and gesture with language. The result is an accumulation of information—flowing, fragmenting and remaining partially unresolved.

Agutos’s paintings often start with an image, sensation or recollection that is reconfigured through the process of painting. In Rage does not serve the patient professional, slabs of gestural abstraction surround a faintly discernible figure chaotically charged with flashes of red, while Not a single sliver of skin produces a less intense, osculatory bounce worked throughout the surface. On the gallery’s third cascading wall, image transfer of the artist’s own photography is embedded within Can’t we just enjoy the scenery?, where a collision, landscape and traces of text scatter across the same pictorial field.

In Words & Paintings, language is positioned as a parallel structure to the visual work rather than an explanation of it. The poems establish “Words” as a potent element of the exhibition. Written by Agutos in English and French, they move between wordplay and aphorism, humor and philosophical reflection, bodily sensation and observation. Their relationship to the paintings is deliberately fluid: at times a text seems to extend an image; at others, it acts as an entry point into the canvas, introducing an entirely different register of thought.

Rage does not serve the patient professional
Anchored by the memory of that lasting taste on the teeth
Restraint renders more efficiently here
2026. Oil, acrylic on canvas, 110 x 175 cm.
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The physical structure of the paintings becomes increasingly pronounced across the exhibition. The real monument is your mind reaches four metres vertically along the second wall on unstretched canvas approaching the full height of the room, while Can’t we just enjoy the scenery? similarly retains its full 183 x 274 cm support without being mounted to a rigid frame. Pinned along the top edge directly to the wall, these canvases buckle, wrinkle and fall away from the surface of the gallery, visually exposing their frayed edges and physical instability. The more intimate works are considered differently. Painted to the very edges of their cut supports before being stretched, the gestures continue around the stretcher bars, with folded corners and exposed diagonal flaps visible from the side. Their surfaces inherit an underlying objecthood of their own: where the monumental works surrender themselves to gravity, the smaller canvases assume a more contained, sculptural presence through the stretcher. This contrast reveals two modes of extending the painted surface beyond the conventional picture plane.

Can’t we just enjoy the scenery?
Restless foreshadows reckless
Head-on collision, dead-on precision
Un délit de fuite
I rest willingly a wreck
2026. Oil, acrylic, image transfer on unstretched canvas, 183 x 274 cm. 
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The range of intensity continues in Le moment où on peut naviguer sans effort / Jusqu’à ce qu’on s’écrase à nouveau, an 80 x 90 cm diptych on jute requiring a heavier application of oil paint. Framed together by the artist, the pair of canvases are enclosed in a structure that registers as both continuous and interrupted, echoed by the title’s movement from ease to disruption.


Le moment où on peut naviguer sans effort
Jusqu’à ce qu’on s’écrase à nouveau
2026. Oil, oil stick on jute diptych framed by the artist, 80 x 90 cm.
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The exhibition concludes with Après-angoisse (After-angst), on its own wall, isolated from the rest of the works. The work incorporates a Bottega Veneta 2026 campaign poster featuring fashion model Selena Forrest, shot by Drew Vickers, removed from a Shoreditch street and mounted onto wooden panels. Agutos intervenes directly into the commercial image, effacing portions of the fashion house’s campaign and logo while retaining sections of the original imagery and his own initials. Unlike the canvases, whose surfaces are built up through the artist’s spontaneous actions, the work begins with an image already saturated with cultural meaning.