ESTATELESS
PREVIEW
12/06/26
ELYSIUM, SWANSEA
Cosmic utopias, spectral intervention, eternal war, and secular transcendence frame the conceptual terrain of André Stitt’s work.
The works selected for this exhibition explore communal habitation and dissolution, often relating to trauma and conflict, with art positioned as a redemptive proposition. The three galleries and café at the new Elysium art space are used to conflate temporal shifts and function as a form of reportage, responding to experiences where the personal becomes political. Each gallery space unfolds as a thematic progression, drawing upon the materiality of the built environment and its abstract displacement through painting, where forms are remembered and reimagined as part of a parallel universe.
Stitt employs allusions to architecture—sites of habitation such as housing estates, military installations, and the occupation and civilianisation of contested spaces—to suggest the instability of human-historical time. The current work is therefore concerned with notions of utopian dysfunction: architecture as a mechanism of power-based indoctrination, and a teleological condition in which the creation of new worlds produces doctrines of endless and intractable conflict.
More broadly, his practice engages with the materiality of the human environment and its abstraction through painting, operating as a memory of forms reimagined within a parallel universe. The ambition is to produce work that generates a sense of recognition counterbalanced by timelessness—paintings that seem to arrive from another time and place, forming a potential dissident space where historical eras collapse into one another.
