Matthias Dornfleld, Clive Hodgson & Alcides Pereira Dos Santos

TheMerode has the pleasure to welcome Christian Mooney, English gallerist living in London, he is the owner and director of Arcade representing 14 international artists. 

Established in 2007, Arcade offers exhibitions, performances, talks, and publications, exploring contemporary art's complexities. The gallery supports artists and investigates art's relevance in public life.

Arcade's visual identity, a comma or breath mark, symbolizes reflection, inspired by artist Anna Barham. During the 2020-2021 lockdowns, this motif reflected the gallery's pause to question art's purpose and impact on society. This mission aligns with TheMerode's belief that art, freedom, education, and creativity can change society faster than politics.

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Crude yet expressive, stupid yet sophisticated and raw yet refined; Dornfeld, Hodgson and Pereira dos Santos grapple with painting's tortured soul, each with sincerity, humour and wit.

About the artists :

Matthias Dornfeld
Born 1960 in Esslingen, Germany Lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Matthias Dornfeld's oeuvre is an inventory of warped classical painterly motifs: the portrait, the landscape, the still life, the abstract. What binds all of his very disparate works together is the way in which they are painted. The subject is not important, but rather, the approach. Dornfeld employs a technique to access his own subconscious, in an attempt to free himself from all theory and ideology. He abandons all academic pretence, and pivots instead toward a cosmic, unmediated clarity. 

About Clive Hodgson
The blatancy of recent abstractions by Clive Hodgson is perhaps a function of the sheer urge to make painting 'difficult' again, in a time when almost anything seems assimilable into the open field of contemporary art. lt is hard to imagine any painting creating the sort of unease today that Hélion's or Guston's style shifts did. Yet Hodgson's refusai of any 'touch', his ultra-thin application straight onto white primer, and his use of ornamentalism, are all truly and excitingly disconcerting. What emerges is the ability of colour, form, structure, illusion and expressive mark to assert them­selves even in the absence of any 'simpatico' handling. The pictures corne alive; and the mysteri­ous terms in which a painting succeeds or fails (or bath simultaneously) are themselves partly the abject of the work's investigations. Remarkable, tao, is that such empirical pictorial experiments are not lacking in wit, humanity even poignancy. 

About Alcides Pereira Dos Santos

Born 1932 in Rui Barbosa, Brasil. Died 2007 in Sâo Paulo, Brasil. Born in Bahia, Brazilian artist Alcides Pereira dos Santos (1932-2007) settled in the central-west state Mato Grosso in 1950. Coming from labouring in the countryside, he tried his hands at shoemaking, barbering and bricklaying. At the age of 19, he experienced what Brazilian art critic Aline Figueiredo describes as "the revelations of his life: religion and painting." As a devout evangelical, Alcides viewed art as a divine gift, a perspective that permeated his oeuvre. Through his wpaintings, he sought to praise the inherent blessings of the land. This led him to reflect on the provision of life through the cultivation of land and livestock, and depict human's utilisation of the earth.