Felix Treadwell at L21 Gallery

Artist: Felix Treadwell

Exhibition title: FEELO

Venue: L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain

Date: June 4 – July 17, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and L21 Gallery, Mallorca

Felix Treadwell’s work invites us to inhabit parallel and imaginary worlds, in which his fictional characters take us by the hand… the origins of these characters are mysterious and lie in the ambit between memory and imagination. Some are references to his own adolescence, while others are completely imaginary but drink from cultural influences and plastic languages such as comic. In this case, as Treadwell puts it, FEELO “is the name of the character I’ve been working on for the last year, a nickname I used to have in school. The inspiration behind FEELO’s style comes from fashion blogs, young hypebeast and even myself as a teenager.”

Adolescence is also a mysterious moment explored in the artist’s work. Sometimes his characters are immersed in everyday actions and, on a deeper level, in rites of passage. The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a moment of vulnerability, but although society pushes for this transition, in Felix Treadwell’s universe characters like FEELO can remain longer in their indeterminacy, conserving a certain sense of innocence. The use of the airbrush contributes to this atmosphere, a technique that Treadwell combines on this occasion with the use of brushes, thus opening up a dialogue between classic and contemporary painting techniques.

Lastly, the new series of works for this exhibition creates a narrative that is not linear, but rather diachronic and extensive: “instead of looking at the world as a whole, I wanted to focus on this character for the exhibition, detailing aspects of her everyday life and expressing them through her style and appearance”. In short, to create a narrative that, as viewers, allows us to understand a multifaceted character, to get to know her different features and her fleeting gaze and to accompany FEELO in her transition towards uncertainty.

Felix Treadwell was born in Maidstone, England in 1992. In his painting he often uses fictional characters who perform everyday actions. Treadwell studied art at Camberwell College of Arts and later specialised in painting at the Royal College of Art, where he graduated in 2018.

He has received awards such as the HIX Award (2014) and participated as an artist in residence at the L21xCamper Foundation (2018). In recent years, his work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions such as “Good Good, Double Good”, Lewisham Art House (London, 2017), “Hand Luggage”, Pierre Pourmet (Bordeaux, 2018), “Fatal Attraction”, Thames-Side Studios, (London, 2018) or “There’s Something

About Painting”, Tatjana Pieters Gallery, (Gent, 2019). His solo exhibitions include “Rupert and Friends”, Union Gallery, Bethnal Green (London, 2017), “Dark Age”, L21 Gallery (Palma, 2018) or “Community”, LTD Los Angeles, (LA, 2019).