Founded in 2021, NISO is committed to supporting the next generation of talents as well as rediscovering the legacy of XXth Century artists whose remarkable contributions to Art History have gone unnoticed in recent times. Located in Central London, the gallery provides a dynamic platform to present solo exhibitions and intergenerational dialogues in collaboration with artists, estates, and representing galleries. 

NISO is committed to supporting the next generation of talents as well as rediscovering the legacy (...)

Supporting early-career artists, rediscovering overlooked masters from the XXth Century. 

Guy Haddon Grant (UK, 1988) works in a space of tension where figurative representation, classical art history and happenstance converge into a rigorous visual grammar, rooted in contemporary, physical, and speculative play. His recent work can be understood as an imaginary archaeology: forms that evoke parts of the human body—faces, limbs, organs, eyes—dismembered, displaced, extracted from their function, and suspended within a new visual order that avoids total unity.

What appears is less the figure than its trace. More than the body, its signs emerge. Instead of the ruin, what arises is that which escapes being fixed as such. In this liminal space between the symbolic and the physical, Haddon Grant constructs sculptures as material enigmas. Plaster, metal, wood: matter both fragile and firm, shaped with precision, without superfluous ornament, contained.

His sculpture unfolds without imposing itself. The viewer stands before an unfamiliar body: a chimera. The mythological reference acts as a generative structure. The works operate as hybrid assemblages, where abstraction and figuration coexist in tension, generating a perceptual unease that eludes easy answers.

From this perspective, Haddon Grant’s practice functions as a subtle critique of traditional monumental sculpture. Rather than reproducing or rejecting it, he dismantles it from within. His fragmented forms interrogate the past instead of celebrating it. They pose questions: what happens when the body loses its function, the symbol its stability, language its order?

Material contrasts reinforce this ambivalence: coarse surfaces, marked by gesture, alongside smooth, polished areas that invite a tactile and introspective reading. Everything in his work oscillates between affirmation and disappearance. There is something ceremonial and something unfinished. As if the pieces were remnants of a rite yet to be invented, or models of a corporeality still to come.

At the core of his practice, Haddon Grant embodies more than he represents. He suggests more than he defines. His sculpture presents itself as a latent state. A presence that demands slowness, attention, and a sensory disposition rarely found in the rhythm of contemporary art.

Within NISO’s curatorial program, Haddon Grant’s work contributes a dimension that is at once archaic, sensorial, and analytical. His sculpture avoids illustration and direct emotional impact. It disturbs, displaces, opens. It proposes a mode of attention born from strangeness, from fracture as a form of thought. In this sense, it enters into dialogue with other voices in the program that explore structure, language, or image through diverse and complementary registers.

Mateo Revillo (Spain, 1993) is an artist who lives and works in Paris. His practice revolves around a central notion: that of latent structures inscribed in an assemblage suspended in time.

There they are, fully visible—fragments, open forms, surfaces that seem to contain duration. This initial materiality leads us directly into his practice, situated between painting, sculpture, and architectural intervention. Revillo works with elemental materials—lime, plaster, pigment—combined with a scenographic sensitivity that, while not visibly tied to any specific style, resonates with deep echoes from various artistic traditions, both past and present, including the Spanish one.

Upon closer observation, each piece reveals itself as a threshold—like the vestige of a future ruin or the remnant of a ceremony yet to occur. A constant tension emerges between structure and fragment, between architecture and fracture, between what has disappeared, what remains open, what lingers suspended in transformation. This same tension is reflected in the way color inhabits the surfaces of his work.

Color in his work does not function as ornament, but as a structural agent. It generates a dense, physical atmosphere—a field of emotion that adds temperature, vibration, and depth. It is not applied; it is revealed. Revillo’s chromatic choices seek density rather than harmony. Color is embodied in matter, attaching itself to the folds of time contained in each surface, intensifying the temporal dimension of the whole.

And it is precisely within this temporality that the constructive core of his work takes shape: a composition of fragments where the unfinished, the open, and the persistent coexist. His forms do not illustrate; they pulse. The material does not represent; it resonates. Everything seems to exist in a state of ongoing transformation or emerging memory.

This logic of instability translates into a will to narrate through interruption. The images he constructs contain layers, folds, and voids that operate as ways of thinking about time and history. Each piece speaks from the present with the voice of something not yet articulated—though that voice rarely settles into fixed form.

Many of his works undergo successive processes of transformation. He adds layers, introduces contradictions, displaces elements. What appears closed today may reopen tomorrow. What was once form dissolves; what presented itself as image becomes trace. There is no final version. What matters is not the result but the journey. His practice rests on a deep belief in change, in increasing complexity, in the possibility of being multiple.

Revillo’s work is not directly or explicitly aligned with the tradition of political or socially critical art in the classic sense. Yet that does not mean it lacks a critical dimension. His work tends to operate from a subtler place—often formal or affective—where the political may surface as resonance, as internal tension between language, matter, and image.

He moves within a field of exploration in which systems of representation, visual codes, and gestures that may seem neutral or formal acquire a critical charge precisely through their ability to destabilize norms, to displace meaning or suspend it. In this sense, we could speak of a micropolitics of form or a structural critique, more aligned with a conceptual and post-minimalist sensitivity than with overt denunciation.

That same critical and experimental attitude drives his expansion into other domains of knowledge. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Revillo has spent years establishing connections between art, architecture, anthropology, and memory. His background in social sciences reinforces this transversal gaze, where each work functions as embodied, culturally active thought.

Rather than delivering a message, his work proposes ways of doing, forms of attention, tactical decisions, and intuitions that do not follow a preordained plan but instead unfold through a material, concrete, and risk-laden internal logic. Color, form, and gesture do not act in isolation, but as parts of a will that is not discursive, but physical.

This will does not exclude use, but it rejects the imposition of function. Revillo does not pursue utility as a mandate. His practice does not respond to an external purpose. It has use, but not imposed function. He inherits an architectural sensibility and an anthropological perspective. He builds like someone who listens; he invents like someone who excavates. Each space—like each work—activates its own rules. Norms, then, are not erased but reorganized. From this reorganization arises a fertile ambiguity, where the formal, the poetic, and the intimate intersect without hierarchy.

From this position, Revillo reserves the right not to say everything. He allows things to simply be. To speak for themselves. And in doing so, he resists the tyranny of the message through the power of a form still in the process of becoming.

Mateo_Revillo_BIO+CV_compressed.pdf

Teatro, 2024 Encaustic and casein paint on cement and plasterboard, wood.

Glauco Series, 2023 Fondo, Galería Alzueta, Barcelona, October 2023.

Ave - Políptico, 2022 Encaustic on cement and plaster, wood 250 x 250 cm 

Köln 2017, 2024 Encaustic on casein, cement and plaster, wood 120 x 270 cm Straight, No Chaser, curated by La Méditerranée, Zuzeum, Riga, 2024

NISO is pleased to present The Exit Shut Opened, Martina Quesada's debut solo exhibition with the gallery, curated by Philippa zu Knyphausen. 

NISO

NISO

21.05—28.06.25

21.05—28.06.25

Artists

Guy Haddon-Grant

Guy Haddon-Grant

Mateo Revillo

Mateo Revillo

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