image: CHRIS BOND, Vor mir vell ect, 2016, oil on canvas, calico, board, 47 x 31 x 6 cm
TXT XXV
November 14 – December 13, 2025
Five Walls Gallery is proud to present TXT XXV, an exhibition exploring the presence and potential of text within contemporary painting. For the third iteration of this ongoing project, the gallery brings together four Melbourne-based artists – Chris Bond, Jon Campbell, PJ Hickman, and Aaron Perkins – each approaching the relationship between language, image, and surface through their own distinct visual logic.
Chris Bond’s practice centres on the invention and embodiment of fictional artists, writers, and organisations as catalysts for creative production. Through meticulously painted facsimiles of imagined books, catalogues, and correspondence, Bond constructs parallel worlds that question authorship, authenticity, and the slippage between fact and fiction.
Jon Campbell celebrates the language of the everyday, drawing on Australian slang and popular culture to investigate how words operate as both linguistic signifiers and formal abstractions. His recent text-based paintings and prints transform snippets of vernacular speech into rhythmic compositions of colour, tone, and gesture — at once playful and painterly.
PJ Hickman is recognised for his conceptually rigorous, reductive aesthetic that challenges the conventions of painting and exhibition display. By distilling visual and linguistic form to its essentials, Hickman examines how meaning is constructed — and often destabilised — within the formal and institutional contexts of contemporary art.
Aaron Perkins’s text-based works reflects on the stories we tell ourselves in order to construct identity. Drawing parallels between painting and self-narrativisation, his works employ fragments of stage direction, repetition, and material layering to reveal how fiction underpins both artmaking and personal meaning-making.
Together, these artists demonstrate the enduring power of text to shape, disrupt, and expand the field of painting – a dialogue that remains as relevant now as when this series began.