PRESS RELEASE

Swashbuckling, debonair, Byronesque, and rogue-ish, Christopher Landoni was perhaps the last of the epic dandies. To know him was to experience pure exquisite beauty; poetic, sublime and tragically fated. He was our most outrageous friend, touching each of our lives with a type of otherworldly magic that exists only in legend. In Pieces is both tribute to and celebration of one of the most dearly missed figures of contemporary art – his life, his work, and his legacy.

Landoni’s art, as his life, was an uncompromising paradisiacal pursuit, a dreamer’s quest for Xanadu, made real through his own making, shared with ostentatious generosity. Poignantly autobiographical with its anachronistic romanticism, opiate splendour, and gothic reverie, Landoni’s work echoes with literary grandeur, wholeheartedly, luxuriantly indulged; malefic in its decadence and excess, dazzling in its shameless ambition and exhibitionism, rapturous in its visionary enchantment (and so wryly, sardonically, gregariously funny). His drawings, black on black, white on white, scratch on glass, anticipate his illusive quarry: torturous pleasure gardens, prison yards, drug dens, and intoxicating landscapes, sumptuous near invisible surfaces concealing laboriously rendered nirvanas. His sculptures blur art historical adulation with regaled fantasia, combining imperious bronze casting, futuristic audio distortions, hilariously grotesque blobs, and meat-eating plants in fetishistic monuments of high design and absinthian ennui. Set in a landmark Georgian house, In Pieces will reconstruct Landoni’s studio environment – with all its joie de vivre and aristocratic connoisseurship – in honour of his living memory and enduring inspiration.

Accompanying Landoni’s work is an exhibition of artworks donated by Landoni’s many friends and collaborators - proceeds will go into a trust for Noah Landoni, Christopher’s 7 year old son.