All the World’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

William Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act II, Scene VII), 1623

By spending time in what could be called a setting, conceived by Charles Laib Bitton in Irene Laub’s exhibition space, one gradually becomes aware of one’s own presence in its architecture. Reconfigured by the artist, the space hosts a whole new series of works designed to fit tailor made panels covering all of its walls and doors.

We enter a gallery of larger-than-life portraits. A young woman, a man, a cat, a plant - each creature is given the same visual value, perhaps the same weight. No hierarchy distinguishes them, they co-inhabit as the elements of an ecosystem, as bit players on a film set, as the characters of an opera chorus.

All the human figures are seated on the very same cane chair posed on the very same tile-floor. They seem to gaze at us from an intimate place, a private cabinet perhaps, where moods are allowed to flow and thoughts to wander. Their gaze is at once fierce and introverted, present and absent, provoking an unsettling, uncanny experience. As onlookers, we are reminded of our own physical body - perhaps vicariously standing for the artist’s agency - acting as a performative, crystallizing entity within this display of characters.

From Untitled, Florence, 2025 to Untitled, Florence, 2026, the titles of the paintings span the sequence of a year’s work in the artist’s Florence-based studio. Stemming from this specific moment and place, Charles Bitton conceived a site-specific, global installation, portraying both the human and non human elements he daily interacts with. The nameless models evoke as much the contingency of their existence as the elusiveness of the captured moment in time.

If art is a thing of the mind - cosa mentale - as Da Vinci suggested, Bitton’s paintings and their very matter convey atti e moti mentali - mirroring perhaps both the model’s and the artist’s attitudes and motions of the mind. Embodying a third party, the viewer acts as the moving tip completing a virtual triad.

Embracing a subtle richness of nuances, the oil paintings are surprisingly all made with a limited color-palette of four pigments. This constraint seems to be part of the artist’s intent to work with a set of simple rules allowing him to create a unified ensemble: a limited set of dimensions and colors, converging towards a quasi religious Trinitarian symbolique. And indeed the portraits are surrounded by frescoes holding a motivic, abstract shape, envisioned by the artist as the symbol of a unified life on earth.

As for the course of the paintings after the show at the gallery, a precise protocol has been designed to allow both the acquisition of each painting separately, and the reuniting of the installation as a whole - notwithstanding its scattering in space and time - thus preserving the possibility of its unity.

– “Theatrum mundi”, Tania Nasielski