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COMPOSED SILENCE

Featured Artist: Fergus Channon

FERGUS CHANNON: COMPOSED SILENCE


Fergus Channon’s practice is built on sustained attention. His works do not present themselves as finished images, but as spaces for looking - structures in which time unfolds gradually, perceptually. Now based in London, with formative years spent living and working in Moscow, Channon approaches both drawing and painting with a vocabulary grounded in rhythm, restraint, and repetition.


He is not concerned with representation in the conventional sense. What occupies his surfaces is not narrative, but condition. Not the object itself, but its tension, presence, and eventual shift. His visual language - marked by asymmetrical arrangements, negative space, irregular linework, and compressed form - quietly conveys something felt rather than stated. These are not still images. They are ongoing states.


Morning Series (2022–2024)


In Morning Series, Channon engages with drawing as a durational process. Completed daily in graphite on paper, each work isolates a moment of quiet observation. What unites them is not subject matter, but spatial rhythm. Compositions are asymmetrical, often anchored in one corner or pressed against the margins. Vast negative space surrounds the forms, not to isolate them, but to activate the page - to allow the drawing to breathe and resist closure.





Morning Series, 2022–2024, Graphite on Paper
Morning Series, 2022–2024, Graphite on Paper

This project emerged from a deeply personal routine. Each morning, Channon’s partner would leave a carefully arranged still life on their circular dining table - a gesture of quiet encouragement before she left for work. Channon would respond by drawing the composition, seated at the same table, approaching the scene with precision, patience, and care. The physical structure of the table - its circular form and central seam - introduced compositional features that became integral to the series. That dividing line, drawn across each image as the final gesture, marked not only the table’s shape but the moment of completion.


The lines themselves are not mechanical. They are slightly uneven, wavering, searching. Shadows build up in soft tonal shifts yet never resolve into photographic illusion. The result is a system of restraint: clarity without finish, accuracy without polish.


Morning Series, 2022–2024, Graphite on Paper
Morning Series, 2022–2024, Graphite on Paper

Over time, the accumulation of these drawings creates a subtle archive of perception. Presence is shown not through depiction, but through difference: slight shifts in shape, tone, pressure. The visual logic - balanced between intention and letting go - builds an atmosphere that resists inertia. These are not observations of still life in the traditional sense. They are not frozen. They retain a sense of internal motion, of something living just beneath the graphite.


Bound by a quiet discipline of one drawing each morning, Channon’s process allows space for unpredictability, perceptual rhythm, and emotional subtlety to emerge. What appears as minimal or repetitive becomes a site of variation, intimacy, and renewal. The series balances formal discipline with emotional resonance, turning a daily domestic gesture into a meditative artistic structure.


The works recall the conceptual frameworks of Roman Opałka or On Kawara, yet Channon diverges in sensibility. His interest lies not in time as metric, but in time as attention. Each drawing is less about representing an object than exploring what it means to look at something long enough for it to begin changing.




Morning Series, 2022–2024, Graphite on Paper
Morning Series, 2022–2024, Graphite on Paper

Tension No.2 (2022)


Tension 2 invites a slower kind of attention - one that resists fixed meaning and instead lets significance emerge gradually. The image is built from overlapping, wavering forms that ripple across the surface in soft tension. Channon’s linework appears fragile, yet deliberate. It is not ornamental - it is structural.


There is no spectacle in this surface. No gesture is overstated. The subtle rhythm of layering, compression, and release allows the image to feel suspended - between expansion and stillness, between presence and absence. Texture, negative space, and tonal shifts do not describe a scene; they construct a state of being.


The result is quiet, but not inert. Through fracture and restraint, Tension 2 becomes a site where time accumulates - not in moments, but in marks. Still, the work breathes.


ension No.2, 2022, Distemper on Canvas, 116 x 86 cm
ension No.2, 2022, Distemper on Canvas, 116 x 86 cm

Cracked No.2 (2022)


In Cracked 2, Channon deepens his exploration of perceptual time through the instability of surface. The painting, composed with reduced colour and minimal figuration, is built around physical tension. Cracks appear not as gestures, but as structural outcomes - traces of pressure over time. The surface does not depict tension; it embodies it.


These fissures - organic, asymmetrical, and slow-moving - act like maps of stress. Tension arises between calm surfaces and fractured edges - this contrast defines the work. Texture becomes temporal. Form holds - and then shifts.


There is no resolution here. Instead, Channon leaves the contradiction open: between what stays still, and what continues to move beneath the surface.


There is no spectacle in his surfaces. No gesture is forced. Yet the result is deeply affecting. Through the careful arrangement of form, fracture, and restraint, Channon offers a space in which we can feel the structure of time - how it compresses, expands, waits.


In stillness, his work remains alive.


Cracked No.2, 2022, Distemper and Oil on Canvas, 116 x 86 cm
Cracked No.2, 2022, Distemper and Oil on Canvas, 116 x 86 cm


Images: © Fergus Channon, Courtesy of the Artist


Editor: Mal

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