Artists

Christian Quin Newell, James Owens, Fabien Adèle, Lingrou Xie

Press release

Public Gallery is pleased to present at twilight / at dawn, a group exhibition of new paintings by Fabien Adèle, Christian Quin Newell, James Owens and Lingrou Xie. Employing figurative, floral and architectural motifs, each artist unsettles the pictorial field, foregrounding discontinuities and states of suspension. The exhibition’s title operates not as a description of time or place but rather as a site of transition and uncertainty, where figures hover between fantasy and hallucination, and time loosens from its linearity. Fabien Adèle Lingrou Xie

Figures gather in parks and wooded enclosures in Fabien Adèle’s works, rendered in oil, chalk and sand on linen. Inspired by his childhood in the south of France, Adèle frames his compositions with tree-lined pathways and cast iron fences. Light is his primary subject: it rebounds across the silhouettes that populate his compositions, operating like statues or mannequins rather than active agents, at times more inert than the surrounding foliage. In Figures dans le parc III (2026), gazes extend beyond the picture plane and displace narrative resolution, inviting the viewer to consider instead the flickering light against leafy canopies.
James Owens’ canvases stage dense foliage in shadowy spaces that dance between reverie and quiet disturbance. In The Nightmare (After Henry Fuseli) (2026), Owens’ renders a domestic interior illuminated only by moonlight, adopting a distinctly darker palette for this work. Figures whisper in partial darkness, their proximity suggestive of either protection or complicity. The titular reference situates the work within a lineage of painting in which dreams press insistently against waking life. In a field of fragile equilibrium, plants propagate with invasive vitality. Interwoven branches and twigs form a spatial lattice that maps the composition like scaffolding while evoking the skeletal remains of a withering terrain.

Botanical silhouettes, intimate portraits and fragments of domestic space dissolve into restrained tonal fields of indigo and smoke in Lingrou Xie’s compositions. Borrowing from film stills and archival imagery, she extracts female figures from specific historical contexts and reconstitutes them through a process of layering and superimposition, echoing the photographic process of double exposure. In The key (2026), multiple temporal registers occupy the same surface – between two reflective cocktail glasses, a two-story house is veiled by a woman applying lipstick – pursuing what Xie has termed ‘parallel time’ in order to disrupt linear narration.

Christian Quin Newell extends the exhibition’s concern with thresholds to a reduced architectural vocabulary, operating both as spatial and psychological structures. Doorways, horizons and doubled figures appear against devotional blues, painted on marble dust primed grounds that emit a muted luminosity. In Threshold (2026), the chalky surface asserts materiality even as the depicted portal proposes depth and passage. Through restraint of palette and form, his paintings maintain a condition of quiet expectancy.

Across the works presented, figures do not anchor narrative so much as register its suspension. at twilight / at dawn considers painting a means of staging perception at its limits – when the day first comes into focus or has already begun to recede.