Cassian Vale

Practice and approach

Cassian Vale's practice begins with the expressive weight of a hand. Fingers can rest, offer, conceal or brace; a painted gesture can remain legible even when much of a body is absent. He develops figurative mural studies alongside looser colour paintings, using each to test the assumptions of the other. A clearly drawn hand may sit inside an unsettled field, while an abstract passage may retain the rhythm of a movement without describing a person. The relationship between those two modes is the central thread of his programme at Ternform.

Vale works first with drawings that isolate a small decision: the space between two fingers, the angle of a wrist or the way a sleeve changes a silhouette. He then asks how that decision behaves when a viewer is several steps away. A line that feels precise on paper may disappear on a rough wall; a narrow coloured band may begin to dominate a figure when enlarged. Rather than correcting every difference, he keeps some of them as information about scale. His imagined studio practice includes permission for any proposed wall, a plan for access and an account of how a temporary image will be removed.

Gesture Ledger concentrates on figurative signs and their public readings. Ordinary Spectra follows a different route, allowing broad colour passages to carry the turning and pausing that a hand might otherwise describe. The two exhibitions belong to the same practice, but neither is a set of illustrations for the other. Their shared question concerns attention: how an image offers a viewer a point of entry, and what happens when that point no longer provides a reliable centre. The later colour exhibition makes this change particularly clear without presenting abstraction as a final stage of artistic development.

Vale keeps a record of failed translations between drawing and painting. A convincing sketch can become stiff when enlarged; a hurried test can reveal a useful gap that disappears during refinement. These records help him explain decisions without turning a finished image into a story of inevitable progress. He asks viewers to begin with a concrete relation, such as a hand against a coloured border, and then test whether their first reading survives a longer look. The gesture need not yield one message. What matters is that the painting offers enough specific evidence for several readings to remain accountable to the same surface.