Bliss accompanies Nahmad Projects’ subversive group exhibition bringing Pierre-Auguste Renoir into charged dialogue with Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Jason Rhoades – an unlikely and provocative constellation of artists exploring eroticism, material excess, and the politics of beauty.

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Designed to echo the atmosphere of the installation, the book resists conventional documentation in favour of a more tactile, affective register. The exhibition itself was saturated in colour and light: Jason Rhoades’ neon work bathed the space in a heady pink glow, refracting across the glass covering Renoir’s paintings and pooling in the faceted blue sweets and beaded curtain by Gonzalez-Torres. It felt both intimate and overwhelming, a kind of visual intoxication, which became the conceptual foundation for the book’s visual and material language. Throughout the layout, restraint and release are held in tension. Typography is pared back, sitting within passages of expansive negative space, disrupted by deep dives into texture and surface. The pacing of the book mirrors the rhythm of the exhibition – by turns bold, intimate, and disorienting. 

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Material choices were made to extend this sensory experience. The cover a holographic silver – oil-slicked and shifting – captures the ambient instability of the gallery space. Edge foiling and blind debossing add tactile complexity, while iridescent endpapers echo the light within the installation. The result is a sensual, layered object – one that shimmers, slips, and refuses to settle. You catch yourself tilting it in the light, not to read, but to watch.​  Produced in close collaboration with Nahmad Projects, Bliss is not a conventional catalogue but an embodied response. It glints with excess, radiates with colour, and holds something of the exhibition’s charge: a residue of light and touch, flickering between surface and meaning.

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​Artists: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jason Rhoades

Gallery: Nahmad Projects

Art Direction & Design: Billie Temple

Installation photography: Stephen White & Co

Still life photography by Neil Watson Studio