Portals / Christopher J Dennistoun
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Opening times 11th March - 15th March 18th - Saturday 21st March.
All days 1pm- 6pm.
Christopher J Dennistoun creates portals—vivid constructions of painted wood, bark, metal, and other useful materials. They are colourful, deliberate, and open to change. Each portal can be hung at different angles; there is no correct top or bottom. Every shift in position changes the composition and the way it feels and what it seems to propose. In this instability lies the work’s invitation—to imagine something new each time it appears.
There’s a sense of play in Denninstoun’s work: the way edges meet at slightly odd angles, or how colour slips beyond its boundary. Some portals lean, some stretch, some seem to wink at the idea of symmetry. They carry the marks of touch and adjustment—the pleasure of building, balancing, and letting things almost fall apart.
Out of this playful tension, the smaller sculptures emerge. They seem to have drifted from the portals, carrying their colours and proportions into freer forms. Some recall flowers, flags, spinning wheels, or fragments of machines—objects that extend the logic of the portal into three dimensions. They give physical shape to the same questions about balance and openness, as if the idea of framing had stepped off the wall to see what else it might become.
Dennistoun’s art moves between structure and release, philosophy and touch. His portals remain calm and deliberate; the smaller pieces unfold their echoes. Together, they create a space where imagination completes what form only begins.
BIOGRAPHY
Christopher J Dennistoun (b. 1949) is a multimedia artist based in London. He began his artistic journey at Winchester College, where he developed an early passion for art. At 16, a Skira book on Impressionism ignited his lifelong fascination with modernist art. Frequent visits to the Tate, Hayward, and ICA deepened his appreciation for the avant-garde.
After early attempts at painting, Chris set it aside, finding traditional techniques incompatible with his vision. Instead, he pursued a 50-year career in rare and antiquarian books, which sharpened his aesthetic sensibilities and fostered lasting connections.
In 2020, the artist reconnected with his creative instincts and developed a unique style incorporating wood, metal Meccano, painted patterns, and negative space. His works challenge the conventional notion of a fixed composition by inviting viewer interaction.
Dennistoun’s practice questions the notion of the ‘picture’ itself—its composition, structure, and authorship. Rejecting the idea that an artwork must have a fixed central motif, he creates pieces that exist in a state of flux. Every work offers infinite possibilities of form, depending on how the Meccano struts are repositioned, reinforcing the idea that the frame is no longer a passive boundary but an active component of meaning-making.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work begins the picture but removes its centre. What remains is the frame, not as support, but as subject. Constructed from painted wood, wire, plastic, and found linear materials, these works occupy the threshold between painting and objects, image and structure. The frames are not fixed. They shift, bend, and alter their geometry, resisting closure or a single resolved form. Absence is not a void but an active space, shaped by material tension and potential movement. The work proposes painting as an expanded, unstable system rather than a static image.
Influenced by Dada, Constructivism, Neo-Plasticism, and Post-Minimalist practices, as well as writers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and W.R. Bion, my work engages with absence, open form, and the instability of meaning. The frame is no longer a neutral support but an event, something contingent, physical, and responsive.
These works invite the viewer to encounter framing itself as an event - something contingent, mutable, and unresolved - where meaning is held temporarily rather than declared.