Artist: Guillaume Linard Osorio

CARVALHO presents Water for wild rushes, Paris-based artist Guillaume Linard Osorio’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Spanning both gallery spaces and demonstrating the symbiotic dyad of Linard Osorio’s practice, this suite of paintings is presented in dialogue with an imposing sculptural installation in the adjacent space—the site of a performance series realized in collaboration with choreographer, Etay Axelroad.

Between the support of the canvas and its surface lies a region rarely explored by artists. Traditionally this would be a vanishingly small territory — a shred of fabric. However, Linard Osorio’s screen paintings use cellular polycarbonate (construction material composed of hollow plastic cells more commonly used in architecture) to engage an interior space within the painting. Paint is funnelled into the material’s cavities, and images arise out of its bleed and spill, the unexpected formal dividends of gravity and chance, though intention is never entirely effaced. What emerges in this work is brought to its finality by the gestural marks across the works’ surfaces. These are made by hand, inspired by his recent engagement with contemporary dance, and have an unruly, spontaneous energy that sits in productive tension with the forms beneath, whose severity reflects the programmatic nature of their origins. Linard Osorio’s singular body of work is born out of a fortuitous command of his chance operations — in which mastery demands patience, acceptance, even surrender — the erratic movement and materiality of ink, and the self-expression possible through unpremeditated embodied gestures.

The intricate grid formed through the medium’s cellular structure is only visible up close. Yet the dramatic shape of its vertical and horizontal lines — sweeping over and across and through the images — remains, and gives these paintings a dynamism, a sense of vibration, as though each were charged with its own electrical current. Though these paintings most obviously evoke the liquid crystal display of a video screen, they are not limited by this point of reference. Individually numbered and collectively titled Hypothetical Landscape, broadly their semblance is to forms of experience (psychic, somatic, visual, emotional) rather than to nameable objects. Nevertheless, intimations of the natural world push through. Through their layers of mark-making, both within and on the surface of the painting, through their patterns and their interruptions, these works grace figuration.

Lines swell, waver and flower, taking on the appearance of stems, rushes, tendrils. The painted surface becomes pond-like, and suggests life flourishing beneath, plankton drifting through brackish water. In Linard Osorio’s work, the manufactured and the natural are not as diametrically opposed as they might at first appear. Plastic may be synthetic, but, as Linard Osorio explains, petroleum is itself formed out of ancient marine organic matter, algae and microorganisms that lived in the oceans millions of years ago. Linard Osorio’s methods draw the memory of its provenance out of the polycarbonate. Water, all the transformation and growth it incubates, the transitional states it empowers, the connections it fosters across time and space and between fauna and flora, form the conceptual basis of the paintings in this presentation.

These works move freely between the primeval and the contemporary. A painting depicts a world, but a digital screen — in its three-dimensionality, in its capacities for duration and change — envelops and transports the viewer. In Linard Osorio’s work, the distinctions between the canvas and the digital screen are consistently and inventively blurred. The smallest unit of the polycarbonate structure, a six millimetre by six-millimetre square, bestows an architectural form on the display screen pixel. This accounts for why some Hypothetical Landscapes (such as 89 and 94) appear to exhibit the horizontal smear of stuttering video monitors and television screens, and why they share these displays’ confounded sense of depth and shallowness. These are not crisp images: in their bleariness they evince an aesthetics of glitch and interruption, which has a nostalgic undertone, harking back to the earlier history and usage of these technologies. The richly immersive respite of 1980s video games; the anticipatory slowness of dial-up internet. (Will the plastic on which he works, Linard Osorio wonders, become a similar site of nostalgic fondness once it has ceased to be used for the sake of the planet in some near-future scenario?)

This nod to nostalgia allows Linard Osorio to reflect upon the collective conditions of perception, what technologies shaped his own vision and that of his generation. Most contemporary easel painting assumes, to a degree, a viewer’s knowledge of the history of art: the way of seeing it puts forward is entrenched in historical techniques, gestures and motifs, even if these strategies are being revisited in order to be reinterpreted. But what if easel painting is not what automatically comes to mind when you are confronted with a rectangular shape marked by colours and forms? Linard Osorio’s works remember painting’s past, but they are as interested in how lived experiences of sight and visual pleasure — all the different ways looking might be invited, arrested and interrupted by attractions that share art’s aim to captivate attention, but aren’t art as we know it — might inform the practice of painting. References to digital screens are not offering stale commentary on their ubiquity in contemporary life, and instead they explore the connection between the culturally determined aspects of perception and its innate condition. Creation and creativity equally preoccupy Linard Osorio. We may live in a digital age in which artificial intelligence can generate images, but Linard Osorio’s paintings remind us what remains possible when working by hand. AI tools can now imitate (albeit poorly) an artist, and Linard Osorio appears to allude to this gimmick in his mischievous reversal of its appropriation, convincingly imitating the aesthetic of the digital.

Architecture is as pertinent an influence to Linard Osorio’s practice as the digital; perhaps even more salient, given his training as an architect. He describes his paintings as ‘stained glass’ and ‘windows’. Architecture might recall the functional, the neutral, the non-illusionistic, the objectively factual, the merely material. But architecture, for Linard Osorio, is about storytelling — an oral tradition, at its heart, that relies upon people for use, circulation and meaning. Similarly, the architectural presence of Linard Osorio’s paintings, their ambiguity and emotionality, make viewers’ subjective responses the focal point of the work. A building guides a user through a space and allows them to follow its narrative and absorb its themes, all of which is communicated non-verbally through spatial arrangements, materials, and light. Linard Osorio’s paintings, rather than having symbolic meanings that might be individually decoded, have this experiential quality. You move amongst them, you let their light, colour and form impress themselves upon you, and from this their ideas, histories and internal dialogues follow.

As long as windows have been architectural features, they have also been artistic motifs. The painting-as-window has a lineage in modern art (without even referring to its long history from the Renaissance onwards) that undergirds Linard Osorio’s contribution to the tradition. Robert Delaunay’s series of abstract, light-filled paintings of windows 1912-13 speak to Linard Osorio’s work as much as Gerhard Richter’s installation Four Panes of Glass (1967). Linard Osorio’s work is rare in how it combines these impulses: the lushly painterly and the austerely architectural.

Guillaume Linard Osorio (b. 1978, France) lives and works in Paris. Linard Osorio has two forthcoming institutional exhibitions in France in 2026, at the Grand Salon des Émigrés at the Château d'Oiron in Plaine-et-Vallées, and with the Centre d'art La Chapelle Jeanne d'Arc in Thouars. In 2025, he was invited to present two site-specific installations of his ongoing series Screen as Performance at the Chateau d’Oiron, Plaine-et-Vallées, and the Chapelle de Locmeltro, Guern. Linard Osorio’s work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the MAMCO Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Geneva), the Bourges Contemporary Art Biennial (Munich), La Maréchalerie Center d'Art Contemporain (Versailles), and the Biennale Internationale de Design (Saint-Étienne), among others.

Linard Osorio is globally represented by CARVALHO, New York, with whom he’s had three solo exhibitions, including a collaborative installation and performance series with choreographer and contemporary dancer, Etay Axelroad. Linard Osorio is a graduate of the École Boulle and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais. His work is in the permanent collections of Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs of the French State and FRAC Bretagne (Régional Fund of Contemporary Art of Brittany, France).