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      Simon Laveuve’s Scaled-Down Tableaux Reveal Post-Apocalyptic Lifestyles

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      “Une Place Au Soleil” (2025) from ‘Vestige,’ mixed media, 1/35 scale, 31 x 26 x 20 centimeters. All images courtesy of the artist, shared with permission

      Simon Laveuve’s Scaled-Down Tableaux Reveal Post-Apocalyptic Lifestyles

      November 20, 2025

      Art

      Kate Mothes

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      There is always something a bit uncanny about Simon Laveuve’s playful miniatures. Whether a ramshackle residence is built impossibly tall or seems to be both upside-down and right-side-up at the same time, we’re drawn into a strange yet alluring world filled with a range of precisely rendered homes and hangouts.

      Laveuve is known for his meticulously sculpted miniatures that evoke post-apocalyptic settings, from stilt houses hovering precariously on rock formations to playful amalgamations of numerous “found objects” like tires and old windows. Typically crafted at 1/24 or 1/35 scale, these tiny tableaux are devoid of people yet feel lived in, as if the inhabitants have just stepped away.

      “La Beauté Des Aurores” (2025), from ‘Les Étoiles,’ mixed media, 1/35 scale, 19 x 28 x 13 centimeters

      Some of Laveuve’s sculptures feature multiple levels, while others focus on a particular interaction between, say, a beach umbrella that someone appears to have pitched not too long ago next to a car that has been abandoned for years, with giant roots growing through the hood. Whether installed on the wall or propped up on a post, the scenes reveal new details when viewed from different vantage points.

      Laveuve has been exceptionally productive lately, as Galerie Decorde just exhibited 10 pieces at an art fair in Strasbourg, France, and the artist has work included in Lucas Nadel’s show at Tagliatella Galleries in Paris, which opens on November 22 and continues through December 20. Among other projects, Galerie Decorde will also include Laveuve’s work in its December group show.

      Check out Laveuve’s website, and follow updates on Instagram.

      “Rêve De Cime” (2025), from ‘Les Étoiles,’ mixed media, 1/35 scale, 34 x 16 x 11 centimeters

      Detail of “Rêve De Cime”

      Detail of “La Beauté Des Aurores”

      “Une Place Au Soleil” (2025) from ‘Vestige,’ mixed media, 1/24 scale, 31 x 26 x 20 centimeters

      “Jour De Fête” (2025), from ‘Vestige,’ mixed media, 1/24 scale, 38 x 26 x 18 centimeters

      “Jour De Fête” (2025), from ‘Vestige,’ mixed media, 1/24 scale, 38 x 26 x 18 centimeters

      Detail of “Jour De Fête”

      “Fleur d’IPN” (2025), from ‘Vestige,’ mixed media, 1/24 scale, 33 x 30 x 21 centimeters

      Detail of “Fleur d’IPN”

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    • 150 Shares60 Views

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      Pastoral Landscapes Brim with Patterns in Luminous Paintings by David Brian Smith

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      Landscape painting is “re-envisioned through a hallucinatory, technicolor lens.”
      Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Pastoral Landscapes Brim with Patterns in Luminous Paintings by David Brian Smith appeared first on Colossal. More

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      Pastoral Landscapes Brim with Patterns in Luminous Paintings by David Brian Smith

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      “And nature smiled” (2025), oil on herringbone linen, 66 7/8 x 55 1/8 inches. All photos by Ben Deakin. Images courtesy of the artist and Ross + Kramer Gallery, shared with permission

      Pastoral Landscapes Brim with Patterns in Luminous Paintings by David Brian Smith

      November 19, 2025

      Art

      Kate Mothes

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      Easter egg-like clouds, glowing sunrise gradients, and myriad vibrant patterns are just a few of the elements comprising David Brian Smith’s otherworldly landscapes.

      Smith grew up in rural Shropshire, England, and his ancestral ties to the region’s agricultural traditions became a major influence on his work after he relocated to London. His works evoke British landscape painting of the likes of the Norwich School of painters, a group of self-taught, working-class artists who self-organized an art society in the early 19th century.

      “All around the Wrekin” (2025), oil on linen, 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 inches

      Smith departs from historically more academic styles of oil painting to create works “re-envisioned through a hallucinatory, technicolor lens,” says Ross + Kramer Gallery, which presents the artist’s solo exhibition, All around the Wrekin. In his starkly contrasted rolling hills, farm buildings, and bulbous trees, Smith also evokes the bucolic yet faintly uncanny paintings of American Regionalist artist Grant Wood (1891-1942).

      “Rooted in the English pastoral tradition yet boldly contemporary in vision, Smith’s paintings explore ideas of place, belonging, and time through radiant color, intricate brushwork, and layered symbolism,” the gallery says. The title of the show references the name of a hill in Shropshire called the Wrekin, distinctive for its conical shape and a popular place to take walks.

      Within the sky, fields, rivers, and forests, hundreds of little hatch marks, flowers, starbursts, and other thematic motifs dance across the surface. He also often incorporates gold and silver leaf to add an even further ethereality to the large-scale, luminous canvases, tapping into the power of color and light to evoke nostalgia and a kind of psychedelic utopianism.

      All around the Wrekin continues through November 22 in San Francisco. Smith’s work is also on view as part of Inner and Outer Worlds, an exhibition of international contemporary painting that runs through April 12 at the Ju Ming Museum in Taiwan. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

      Detail of “All around the Wrekin”

      “Jackfield” (2025), oil and gold leaf on herringbone linen, 66 7/8 x 55 1/8 inches

      Detail of “Jackfield”

      “A Dragons Eye” (2025), oil and gold leaf on herringbone linen, 82 5/8 x 70 7/8 inches

      Detail of “A Dragons Eye”

      “A place of my heart” (2025), oil on linen, 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 inches

      Detail of “All around the Wrekin”

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    • 200 Shares88 Views

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      Memory and Novelty Converge for Manuela Solano, Who Adopted a New Process After Losing Her Sight

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      “I’ve heard that memories change every time we revisit them,” she says. “This means everybody faces the problem of remembering.”
      Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Memory and Novelty Converge for Manuela Solano, Who Adopted a New Process After Losing Her Sight appeared first on Colossal. More

    • 200 Shares88 Views

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      Memory and Novelty Converge for Manuela Solano, Who Adopted a New Process After Losing Her Sight

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      “Orlando” (2025), acrylic on canvas, 215 x 215 centimeters. All images courtesy of Manuela Solano, shared with permission

      Memory and Novelty Converge for Manuela Solano, Who Adopted a New Process After Losing Her Sight

      November 19, 2025

      Art

      Grace Ebert

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      When Manuela Solano delineates a cheekbone or shapes the chiseled torso of a cowboy standing tall, precisely placed nails, tape, and pipe cleaners offer guidance. The artist, who is blind, works intuitively, feeling out the areas she and her team have marked and trusting that together, the desired imagery will emerge. “I try to force myself to keep [the shapes] faster and looser, which feels great,” she adds. “It makes the process more playful.”

      At just 26, medical malpractice in her HIV treatments caused Solano to lose her sight. She’s since adapted to new ways of working, as she taps into both her memory and imagination to produce paintings that reflect her concerns and joys. “My work is always, on some level, about myself. I make work about either my taste, my yearnings, or something I see of myself in someone else,” she says.

      A beautiful film by Barbara Anastacio for T Magazine—which was made in 2018 before the artist’s gender transition—visits Solano’s then-studio in Mexico City and glimpses her process in detail. We see the artist flip through work made before she lost her sight in 2014 as she traces her practice from art school to the present.

      Snowy scenes and portraits appear throughout the sketchbook and offer a visual throughline to her work today. Recent paintings like “Walking on Water” retain the vast landscapes of her earlier pieces as ripples pulse across the sea’s surface. “Me and my team are constantly figuring out the best way to paint textures or effects we haven’t painted before. In that way, we are continually learning,” she adds.

      Similarly, a collection of self-portraits presented in her solo show Egogénsis, held earlier this year in Madrid, reflects a complex evolution of identity through a variety of tender portraits. Gender is fluid in this body of work, and the connection between humans and nature is intrinsic, as parts of the environment seem to imprint themselves onto her figures.

      While Solano does pull from memory, she’s quick to clarify that this process isn’t unique to her practice. “I’ve heard that memories change every time we revisit them,” she says. “This means everybody faces the problem of remembering things a different way than they actually look.”

      “Dinosaurio” (2025), acrylic on canvas, 215 x 215 centimeters

      Having recently relocated to Berlin, Solano incorporates parts of her daily life into much of her practice, allowing her ongoing experiences and dreams to mix with imagery from the past and produce new compositions. She explains:

      Nowadays, I am making a lot of work about my current comings and goings, all of it things I obviously have never seen. I think there is a common misinterpretation that my work is perhaps about memory, that I am painting the things I saw. And this often comes with the rather ableist worry that someday I might run out of memories to paint. But this is not the case at all. I am originating new images and putting them in my work all the time.

      Solano is also a writer and often pens poems and stories to accompany her paintings. A recent piece, which she refers to as a manifesto, will accompany her new Blind Transgender and Wild series. If you’re in Mexico City, you can see the artist’s pop-culture works through January 4 at Museo Tamayo, before the exhibition travels to CAAC Sevilla in 2026. Find more of her work on Instagram.

      “Cowboy” (2025), acrylic on canvas, 215 x 215 centimeters

      “The Childlike Empress” in process

      “The Childlike Empress” (2024)

      “Walking on Water” (2022)

      “Functional Leather” in process

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    • 150 Shares80 Views

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      Vibrant, Beaded Portraits by Felandus Thames Honor Memories and the Black Diaspora

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      “Wail on Whalers (portrait of Amos Haskin)” (2024), beads on coated wire and aluminum rod, 95 x 72 x 4 inches. Photos by Chris Gardner. All images courtesy of the artist, shared with permission

      Vibrant, Beaded Portraits by Felandus Thames Honor Memories and the Black Diaspora

      November 18, 2025

      Art

      Kate Mothes

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      From thousands of colorful hair beads, Felandus Thames conjures vibrant patterns and portraits. He takes historical photographs as a starting point, focusing especially on Black and Indigenous figures whose stories have largely been underrepresented in American historical narrative. These include dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey and Amos Haskins, a 19th-century Wampanoag man who became a master mariner—one of the few Indigenous people to do so.

      Based in West Haven, Connecticut, Thames emphasizes powerful associations with materials. In the case of these portraits, he employs beads frequently used to style braids. Recent projects also include installations incorporating multiple hairbrushes. “Lately, I’ve been thinking about the affordances of material and their ability to necessitate an idea,” Thames tells Colossal. “I’ve been mining materials from my childhood,” he adds, delving into memories that connect him and others within the Black diaspora.

      “Untitled (portrait of Alvin Ailey)” (2025) hair beads on coated wire and aluminum rod, 60 x 41 x 4 inches

      These materials reference both historical and contemporary functions, from the use of beads and shells as currency in early societies to the way a beaded curtain was separated different areas within Thames’ childhood home. “In these works, I offer the everyday as cultural currency,” he says.

      Thames describes the mass-produced plastic components as “Black pixels,” akin to pieces of fabric patchworked together to form a quilt. A creative practice his maternal ancestors also pursued, quilting provides another “way of speaking to how carry memory with us,” he says. The neatly beaded strands, suspended from aluminum rods, also become almost fabric-like.

      In his recent work, Thames has been interested in the Black radical tradition, a philosophy that rejects colonial attitudes, such as slavery, racial segregation, and other forms of oppression. The Black Panthers and the civil rights movement evolved around this philosophy, with more recent examples including the Black Lives Matter movement.

      For Thames, Black radical tradition is “a form of resistance and insurgency” by people who took great leaps and made lasting change. “My focus gets beyond the outlier or exceptional individual, but thinking about people who have fostered sustainable change to the apparatus,” he says.

      “African King of Dubious Origins” (2022), hair beads on coated wire and aluminum rod, 48 x 78 1/4 x 4 inches

      Thames’ portraits exemplify changes or behavior that created something akin to what he calls a “scaffolding for substantive change.” Surrounded by vibrant patterns, their likenesses, often drawn from black-and-white archival photos, become timeless.

      “Wail on Whalers (portrait of Amos Haskin)” is currently part of Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea, which continues through January 19 at the Mystic Seaport Museum. Thames’ work is also currently on view in the group exhibition EXODUS at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, which continues through April 18, 2026. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

      “Jubilee” (2025), hair beads on coated wire with aluminum rod, 84.x 48 x 4 inches

      “Believed to be Jenny Freeman in her Sunday’s best” (2024-2025), plastic beads, coated wire, and aluminum, 92 1/2 x 60 x 4 inches

      “King David of Harlem” (2024), beads on coated wire with aluminum rod, 85 3/4 x 48 x 4 inches. Photo by John Bentham

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    • 138 Shares96 Views

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      Tomislav Topić Meticulously Layers Hundreds of Panels into Prismatic Mesh Installations

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      “Echoverse.” All images courtesy of Tomislav Topić, shared with permission

      Tomislav Topić Meticulously Layers Hundreds of Panels into Prismatic Mesh Installations

      November 18, 2025

      Art

      Kate Mothes

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      From dozens of painted mesh fabric panels, Tomislav Topić’s undulating, site-specific installations transform airy spaces into immersive experiences. Superimposed in layers that are meticulously suspended from the ceiling or between outdoor structures, the panels interact with sunlight and one another to create vibrant gradients.

      One of Topić’s most recent interventions, Echoverse, consists of 57 different colors on 451 panels, stretching nearly 100 feet long and about 25 feet wide. It’s currently installed in a spacious former chapel home to Les 3 CHA, an art center in Châteaugiron, France, where the work flutters wave-like through the open space.

      Detail of “Echoverse”

      Additional recent pieces include “Nexus Lucis,” which centered above the altar of a large church in Gisors, France, earlier this year. And new this fall, an outdoor installation titled “Afterburn” floats above Intendencia Street in downtown Pensacola, Florida.

      Geometry, hue, and light interact to create prismatic interactions. “Every color, every layer, every viewpoint responds to another—like lines of a poem extending one another, or like sound waves traveling through the space and refracting in the air,” Topić says in a statement. Hovering independently yet arranged with precision, the perceived effect evolves as one walks around the work. From one vantage point, the installation may appear more opaque, but from another, its faceted and translucent nature is revealed.

      Topić carefully considers the nature of spaces, how we interact within them, and how shifting light throughout the day changes how they feel. “It is important to me to create a work that introduces a deliberate contrast, yet still merges with the space,” he says. “I love this symbiosis; for me, it is essential—especially in a place that carries more than 800 years of history.”

      Echoverse continues through December 14. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

      “Afterburn”

      Detail of “Afterburn”

      “Echoverse”

      “Nexus Lucis”

      “Nexus Lucis”

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    • 138 Shares104 Views

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      The Spanish Quarantine Island Residency Where Artists Disconnect—and Phones Are Banned

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      All images courtesy of Quarantine, shared with permission

      The Spanish Quarantine Island Residency Where Artists Disconnect—and Phones Are Banned

      November 17, 2025

      ArtColossalPartner

      Grace Ebert

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      Dubbed “purgatory for artists,” Quarantine is dedicated to finding freedom through constraint. The intensive residency program takes its name from its venue: an 18th-century lazaretto off the coast of Menorca, Spain.

      Built between 1793 and 1807, the fortress in the port of Mahón was a prison for sanitation, at which travelers would dock and be quarantined for a few weeks or until they recovered from disease. The facility closed about a century later, although the Gothic architecture and cemeteries that were once fundamental to its operations remain. Today, the secluded island is typically utilized as a tourist destination, event space, and the home of a mysterious residency.

      Conceived in 2017 by artist Carles Gomilla, the residency program has always been experimental and emerged in various iterations before debuting in its current form in 2023 with partners Joan Taltavull, Itziar Lecea, and Darren Green. Gomilla is steadfast in his commitment to the ethos of Quarantine. Each spring and fall, he and his team invite about 60 people to the island, where they spend the week immersed in a rigorous program. The particulars of each edition are kept secret, and no phones are allowed.

      This untethering allows a special kind of focus and a sense of communal vulnerability as everything that happens on the island, really does stay on the island (residents even have the opportunity to burn their work at the end of the week). The intention, the curators say, is to push artists to find their purpose, a task they undertake through a carefully crafted schedule. Gomilla is quick to make the distinction that Quarantine should not be thought of as a retreat but rather a training program, one that asks participants to stretch beyond their typical limits.

      Residents rotate between art labs and sessions with a slate of high-profile mentors—this upcoming edition includes artists we’ve featured on Colossal, Yuko Shimizu and Martin Wittfooth—with a variety of programming in the evening. The specifics of the art lab activities are always evolving, allowing for surprise and novelty with each day and each edition. Contrast is key, Gomilla says, as is risk. Although the structure of the program remains consistent, fewer than half of the activities and particular prompts are repeated. “I found that the more risky, the better it works,” Gomilla adds. “This is quite an incentive to change things every edition.”

      Because the program isn’t prescriptive or focused on perfecting techniques or introducing theory, it functions as an inverse of the typical courses you’d find in an art school. The labs take cues from “art, education, psychology, and strategy,” Gomilla says. “I believe technique is extremely important, but we need to build something that complements it.” Instead, Quarantine focuses on mindset. “We push you to confront your fears, unlearn what’s restraining you, and rediscover the fire that makes you create,” a statement on its website says.

      While the program is focused largely on making visual works, it attracts people who might not identify first as artists. Lawyers, psychiatrists, and even a rescue dog trainer work alongside designers, art directors, and concept designers.

      The theme of the upcoming edition is Tears in the Rain, a reference to the iconic monologue from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Detaching oneself from the work is a central intention, and like all of Quarantine’s editions, part of the philosophy its creators hope to foster.

      Colossal will attend this spring’s program, from April 13 to 19, 2026. Find out more about joining us and the application process on Quarantine’s website.

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