PHANTASMS
ELLI ANTONIOU, ÉLISE PEROI, MARIE SCHUMANN, KRISTIAN TOUBORG
OPENING SATURDAY, 04.05.25 | 4 – 6PM
ON VIEW UNTIL 05.23.25
In Parmigianino’s masterpiece Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1523), the artist does not merely picture himself painting his likeness from a mirror, he produces an object that masquerades as a mirror bearing his reflection. In the foreground, Parmigiano’s hand — seen creating this very painting — is colossal, steadying the surrounding room that tilts and curves as it enfolds him. Parmigianino’s painting insists on the artifice of all art, its reliance on illusion and distortion even in instances where fidelity to reality is the stated ambition and desired effect. As John Ashbery notes in his long poem about the painting, speculation comes from the Latin speculum, meaning mirror: even images that appear real and convincing are in fact phantasms produced by reflected light. Elli Antoniou, Élise Peroi, Marie Schumann, and Kristian Touborg can each be seen to respond to Parmigianino’s legacy, his entwining of sight and doubt, his exploration of the tensions between image and reality.
Touborg’s sculptural paintings are comprised of wooden nodes, aluminium bars, and lengths of translucent fabrics that enclose images. Each work uses the title "Øʝєblɩƙ Øʝєьlіκ” — the Danish translation for ‘moment’ — followed by different English phrases in parentheses. This framing presents Touborg’s paintings as concrete transcripts of discrete, fleeting visual phenomena. Painting typically struggles to acknowledge that even if something is still and apparently unchanging — for instance, a landscape observed from a fixed point — it actually never remains identical to itself for long. Touborg captures how air and light perform hundreds of subtle, infinitesimal progressions even over the shortest intervals of time. All paintings could be prefaced with an announcement of their specificity and inevitable redundancy; whatever an artwork purports to describe, Touborg insists, the description is only accurate for a moment. Instead, his paintings disclose perception’s physical qualities, that vision is hardly one-dimensional.
Touborg’s blocks of shimmering color offer a theory of perception in agreement with that put forward by Schumann. Digitally processed photographs are visual prompts for an industrial weaving process in which each pixel is translated into a thread. Our vision is inexorably limited by our bodies and our imaginations. Touborg’s work seeks to reproduce the world’s multitudinous, shifting qualities outside these strictures, but Schumann’s work asks what compromises the sight of a machine. While Touborg is interested in the ephemeral aspects of perception as they relate to the experience of being in time as a human individual, Schumann incorporates analogous thinking about mechanical error into her work. Much of Schumann’s process, she explains, creates reliable results — but there is a lot that cannot be foreseen. In the Monofil Folds series, glitches created by the mechanised loom are preserved, given as much space and attention as the artist’s intentional gestures. Light reflections and creases in the jacquard weave give Schumann’s surfaces a three dimensionality that embodies the sensory aspects of sight. The screens appear to ripple as though made of water in constant, changing relationship to light, or like the monitor of a computer shimmering with new windows of information.
Schumann’s photographic source material is not always immediately discernible in the finished sculpture. The trace it leaves is understated – more like an atmosphere or mood. Similarly, Peroi’s woven paintings begin their lives as lengths of painted gouache on silk and linen depicting floral motifs. She takes these paintings apart and weaves them back together by hand in an act of remaking that leaves space for light and air. The original image lingers on as a ghostly presence.
Schumann’s fiber sculptures meditate on the physical properties of her materials, how one medium might imitate or translate itself into another. A pixel-based file — a format legible only through a computer — becomes a tangible, tactile thing in space, an enveloping architecture. Antoniou’s drawings on stainless steel offer their own explorations of materiality. Metal panels are engraved with sinuous, spectral forms. Their format and resemblance to reflective surfaces give these works the look of mirrors, but there is a mysterious intensity to them that also invites comparison with more mystical thresholds. Antoniou’s use of low relief, her play with chiaroscuro and the effect produced by the angle grinder convey depth despite the works’ flatness. These trompe-l'œil surfaces recall the spatiality of Parmigianino’s illusory room.
Peroi shares many of these concerns regarding the mediated image. Looking is never solely an optical experience: it includes a diversity of embodied, affective, haptic and aural sensations. What unites the work in this presentation is an acknowledgement of this fact, and the inadequacy of traditional figurative painting in capturing reality’s abundance and heterogeneity. What we see is a block of complex sensory data that can be translated into a single, static image — but only if we accept certain losses. Distortions, glitches, mediums imitating one another, unresolved errors and an emphasis on process are all strategies that together propose a more phenomenological mode of perception.
Exhibition text by Dr. Rebecca Birrell
Elli Antoniou (b. 1995, Birmingham, U.K.) has devised a hybrid technique combining gestural drawing with the use of abrasive tools to subtly alter the surface of steel panels, transforming their reflective properties. Animated by their surrounding light, her ‘metallic drawings’ propose scaleless fluid cosmoi in perpetual motion. Antoniou holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London (2020), and a BA in Fine Art & History of Art from Goldsmiths University of London (2017). She has been awarded the ARTWORKS 2022–23 Fellowship by Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Greece, and has been a resident artist at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2023). Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Passages Through the Caustics, Cob, London (2024), Morphic Fields, Night Cafe, London (2024), and A brief interval - spills within, Split, London (2024). Group exhibitions include Involution, Wildreeds, Athens (2024), Veils of Impermanence, Gossamer Fog, London (2024), and Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, Tabula Rasa, London (2024). Antoniou’s upcoming exhibitions are with Miart, Cassina Projects, Milan (2025), Abandoned Cartographies & Other Odd Hours, CAN, Athens (2025), and In Tandem, Cob Gallery, London (2025).
Élise Peroi (b. 1990, Nantes, France) is a fiber artist based between Brussels, Belgium and Arles, France. She holds an MFA in Textile Design from the Brussels Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (2015) and has over 10 years of experience in international collaborations. For Thirsting Flowers at CARVALHO PARK, New York, marks her first US exhibition. Recent solo exhibitions include Vent Dominant, Galerie Anne-Sarah Benichou, Paris, France (2025), and Vivre de paysage, Le Kiosque, Mayenne, France (2025), as well as House of Crystal, Hermès, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2024). Other notable exhibitions include Un Lac Inconnu, Bally Foundation, Switzerland (2023), Roma, a Portrait, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Italy (2023), House of Dreamers, Boghossian Foundation, Belgium (2023), and A l’Ombre de nos Paupières Baissées, Centre d’Art Contemporain Chanot, France (2022). Peroi has upcoming exhibitions with Fotokino, Marseille (2025) and Křehký Mikulov Festival, Mikulov, Czech Republic (2025). Peroi was recently featured in PLUS magazine’s ‘An Endless Search for Connection’ by Valentina Buzzi, and has participated in residencies including Fondation Thalie, France (2023) and Academia Belgica, Italy (2022).
Marie Schumann (b. 1991, Offenbach a.M., Germany) is a textile and installation artist who lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. Schumann has been included in numerous institutional exhibitions including Textile Manifestos – From Bauhaus to Soft Sculpture, currently on view at The Museum of the Zurich University of the Arts. Schumann recently presented a solo exhibition at Visarte Zurich, titled Fluid Movements (2023); she participated in Textile Design Now at the University of Quebec in Montréal (2023), and Textile Garden at The Museum of the Zurich University of the Arts (2022). She has presented public projects including an installation during Pan Art in Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2024), a textile installation during Mexico City Art Week at Expo Reforma, Mexico (2024), and Soft Walls, an installation at The Museum of the Zurich University of the Arts with Simone Züger (2023). Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest Germany, New York Times Style Magazine, Sight Unseen, Maisons et Ambiances magazine, and Swiss-Architects. Schumann holds an MA in Textiles from Lucerne University, Switzerland, and a BA in Textile from Hamburg University, Germany.
Kristian Touborg (b.1987 in Roskilde, Denmark) holds a Masters from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Denmark. In 2025, Touborg will present solo exhibitions at CARVALHO PARK, New York, and Lundgren Gallery, Palma, as well as group exhibitions at Jorn Museum, Denmark, and HEART (Herning Museum of Contemporary Art), Denmark, as well as at The Armory Show, New York, with CARVALHO PARK. The artist presented his first institutional solo exhibition in 2022 at Kunsthal Kongegaarden, Denmark. Recent exhibitions include FRIEZE No. 9 Cork Street in London with Newchild Gallery (2025) and with CARVALHO PARK (2024), Fringes of Reflection, Galleri Golsa, Oslo (2023, solo), Vibrant Escape: Ode to Summer, WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong (2023), Merged Echoes, CARVALHO PARK, New York (2023), Dandelion, Newchild, Antwerp (2023, solo), Fluttering The Void, Berlinskej Model, Prague (2022, solo), Trust in Mortals, Brigade Gallery, Copenhagen (2022), Light Blue Noise, Lundgren Gallery, Palma de Mallorca (2022, solo), Peripheries, Newchild, Antwerp (2022), Bright Beneath, Eduardo Secci Novo Projects, Milan (2021, solo), As We Turn Fluent, CARVALHO PARK, New York (2021), and Soft, Metal, Factory — HEART Collection, Herning Art Museum, Denmark (2021), where his work is in the permanent collection. Touborg lives and works in Copenhagen.