Busheshen hanya, 2025 Oil and spray paint on canvas 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Layered Realities: Shifting Histories and Unsettled Memories in Palimpsest at C24 Gallery

C24 Gallery is pleased to present Palimpsest, a compelling two-person exhibition featuring the oil and acrylic canvases of Fidelis Joseph and Juan Manuel Salas, running from April 23 to June 5, 2026, with an opening reception on April 23 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.

 Rooted deeply in the material logic of accumulation and erasure, this presentation investigates how visual imagery outlives its original environment.

 The exhibition thoughtfully considers the quiet, unnoticed moments of daily life while simultaneously collapsing the linear temporality of the traditional artistic canon.

 Across the distinct practices of both artists, the image refuses to remain fixed or definitive, existing instead as something contingent, overlapping, and deliberately unresolved.

 Both painters operate with an archival sensibility, attending to fragments that are incomplete, anonymous, or easily overlooked, ensuring that the works remain continually in flux and never fully settled.

Fidelis Joseph draws from a vast personal archive of collected memories, casual photographs of friends and family, and unanchored online imagery, treating each source material with equal weight. 

For Joseph, a stranger’s face discovered on the internet carries the same emotional potential as an intimate family portrait, focusing primarily on how each image serves to link our shared human condition.

 His subjects emerge not through loud declaration but through a gradual accumulation of marks, where each painting begins as an open-ended question that the physical process of creation eventually answers.

 Joseph’s oil paintings resist completion as a core formal principle, allowing figures to trail off into exposed canvas and utilizing cropped, abstracted compositions that withhold just as much as they reveal. 

These deliberate absences and fragmentations mirror the way human experience actually arrives—in fleeting glimpses and partial revelations rather than fully resolved pictures.

 His mark-making is careful and considered, ensuring that beneath the underlying unease running through the work, a profound quality of attention persists, signaling to the viewer that these obscured subjects are held with deep care.

Juan Manuel Salas builds each of his canvases as a shifting composition, layering and dissolving images until the physical surface becomes a permanent record of its own making. 

Fidelis Joseph Untitled (n'daga min), 2025 Oil on canvas 60 x 48 in 152.4 x 121.9 cm

Gestures drawn from ancient Roman frescoes, tactile archaeological textures, and scattered fragments of digital culture occupy the very same visual plane. 

For Salas, this juxtaposition does not resolve into a unified, singular image, but instead serves to suspend competing eras in a state of mutual tension. 

His works prioritize the persistent nature of materiality, mediating each visual vignette through veils of pigment that allow individual moments to sink beneath the surface and reemerge in altered configurations. 

Rather than declaring a singular narrative, meaning in Salas’ paintings accumulates gradually, inviting the viewer to contend with ideas that shift constantly between legibility and latency. 

He constructs his paintings through stratified layers that alternately conceal and disclose, allowing earlier marks to resurface with a quiet, stubborn persistence.

Ultimately, Palimpsest highlights an artistic dialogue where images appear and recede simultaneously. Instead of resolving into clarity or total completion, the works of Joseph and Salas sustain multiple timelines at once. 

Like the mechanics of human memory itself, the paintings on display remain beautifully unstable, offering a space where the past and present are constantly rewritten over one another.

Juan Manuel Salas Little Beast (The Coat is a Black Insect), 2026 Oil on canvas 8 x 10 in 20.3 x 25.4 cm