TACTUS turns Jon Pilkington painting into collectible art puzzle
TACTUS launches The Art of Assembly in Copenhagen with its first limited-edition collaboration, created with British artist Jon Pilkington and presented during CHART and Enter Art Fair. The new platform reframes the familiar instruction “Please do not touch the art” by making physical interaction central to the experience, inviting collectors to assemble a work piece by piece rather than encounter it only as a finished image. The inaugural edition, Wool Hunter of Gotland, was shown at TABLEAU Gallery on 28 August 2026.
At the centre of the launch is Pilkington’s original painting Wool Hunter of Gotland, translated into a museum-quality art puzzle produced in an edition of 15. Artist-grade papers, archival inks and carefully controlled production are used to preserve the qualities of the source artwork, while the assembly process introduces a different tempo of looking, requiring the collector to spend time with colour, edge, texture and composition before the image is complete. TACTUS positions this act of construction as part of the artwork’s experience rather than as packaging or secondary entertainment.
Pilkington’s painting is particularly suited to this format because its composition already moves between abstraction and figuration. Loose forms emerge through overlapping washes, fields of colour and partially defined figures, while a recurring dog appears and dissolves across the surface. Reassembling the image fragment by fragment makes these transitions more visible, drawing attention to tonal shifts and small details that can disappear when the work is viewed only as a complete whole. The act of assembly therefore mirrors the painting’s own construction, where fragments accumulate into an image that never resolves into a single fixed reading.
The project introduces TACTUS as a platform built around limited-edition collaborations with contemporary artists, with each release transforming an original work into a tactile assembly experience. Founder Brandon Polley developed the concept around the idea that touch can create a more direct relationship between artwork and collector, using time and participation to challenge the distance normally maintained around art objects. Future editions are planned as an evolving series, each developed closely with a different artist and produced as a collectible object in its own right.
Jon Pilkington, born in Merseyside in 1990, works across painting and drawing with a practice that repeatedly tests the boundary between recognisable imagery and abstraction. His compositions are built through processes of construction, destruction and reconstruction, allowing everyday objects, organic forms and art-historical references to appear, recede and return across layered surfaces. He completed an MFA with Distinction at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2013, and Wool Hunter of Gotland extends this interest in fragmented imagery into a format where the viewer physically reconstructs the work.
With The Art of Assembly, TACTUS proposes a slower and more participatory model for encountering contemporary art, shifting attention from passive viewing toward touch, repetition and concentration. The inaugural collaboration with Pilkington makes that proposition especially clear because the work’s visual uncertainty is intensified through the puzzle format, requiring the image to be discovered gradually rather than received all at once.
All images credit: TACTUS
