A Gateless Gate
An accompanying text by Hugh L. Magnus for Canopy at Sutton Projects.

Regret emerges smiling from the sea,

the sick sun slumbers underneath an arch

Charles Baudelaire, Recueillement

Before a picture represents anything, it tells us something about consciousness. Ductus

(movement, flow) is a classical term originally used to describe rhetorical structure: applied to

literary, artistic and architectural compositions, it indicates the path of the mind moving through a

work. The distinctive architectures of Felix Oliver and Naoise Halloran-Mackay in Canopy invite

such a reading, one in which constructed space transfigures and transcends the powers of eye and

mind.

Architecture and figure have long been inseparable in art, from the sculpted caryatids of Classical

(and Neo-classical) times to buildings’ deployment as framing devices in Gothic and Renaissance

painting. For de Chirico, the presence of whose empty arcades can be felt in Halloran-Mackay’s

intricate structures, “the open doors, arches and windows that accompany [Giotto’s] figures allow

one to feel a presentiment of cosmic mystery.” The blankness of the empty frame—here, that of

the house and the window—is supplanted by an oneiric reminder of that old aperçu; “the arch

never sleeps.” There is always something present in this negative space; the invisible relations of

force that bear structure, yes, but so too an engendering of the image’s self-awareness.

The gestural, illocutionary qualities of architecture demand an impression or gesture in return; in

these works it is the act of penetrating layered space. While we have those who followed Giotto

to thank for linear perspective, the works in this show share more of a sensibility with the

additive space pioneered by artists of the Dutch Golden Age—Vermeer and van Hoogstraten

among others—whose meticulous interiors are that, in the words of their forebear Karel van

Mander, “into which the eyes may plough”. (Incidentally, this period also saw the development of

marquetry as a trade, the ébénistes of the Low Countries fuelling a mania for inlaid wood across

the palaces of Europe.) Constructing seeing in this self-aware manner acts as a sort of visual trap,

thematising a rhetorical, active looking. Trompe l’œil, the fabrication of illusory space, has no

small part to play in this entrapment. Indeed, Lacan recounts the foundational narrative of the

technique (the tale of two artists, Zeuxis and Pharrhasios, the former of whom is fooled by the

latter’s painted veil) as suggesting “a triumph of the gaze over the eye”.

Yet in Canopy the veils are both painted and real. Organza shrouds or absent panes of glass

complicate a reading that invariably prioritises obscuration as the object-cause of desire. How

then can these works be navigated, the contradiction of spaces for moving through (with the eye

or the body) that are by nature impassable? Walter Benjamin tells us that the interior, “for the

private man, represents the universe.” Perhaps then containment, rather than movement, is the

wellspring of space. The journey of architectonic exploration in Oliver and Halloran-Mackay’s

work is testament to this, both artists undertaking a bringing-forth of space and image. The blank

arch, that gateless gate, shapes our entry into the dream.

Hugh L. Magnus, July 2026