5b presents Personicx, an artist’s book by Theo Christy. The publication focuses on a collection of A4 collages, prints, and drawings by the artist shown at 1:1 scale—facsimiles which maintain an uneasy tension between reality and the squashed surface of the screen. Across each page, characters are introduced, reworked, and recast—imposed over the exhibition documentation, text and checklist, and beneath the twisting silhouette of a ballerina. These exploratory exercises were central to the development of a group of “unboxing paintings” included in When studying the world, the artist's debut solo exhibition at Charity, Glasgow in 2023. A text by Ben Maxwell, titled The Terrifying Space of the Picture, accompanies the publication. ‘Dispossessed of our illusions, the planes of brown cease to describe the crisp surface of receding cardboard. Instead, they open out psychotically like arbitrary segments cropping the play of light over the churning surface of a vast pool of faecal sludge, incongruous highlights catching cracks in the ceilings of different caves, cropped by disgusted lines, or by the canvas edge, like the bottom left corner where a radial current threatens to spill out onto the wall below.’ Theo Christy is an artist based in Glasgow. Christy is one half of Gallery Malmo, an ongoing collaboration with artist Gregor Horne. Recent exhibitions include: Charity at David Dale (with Gregor Horne), David Dale Gallery (2024), Would you be worried if one of these Scottish people ceased to exist?, Govan Project Space (2024) and Sick of it, Charity (2023). Ben Maxwell is an artist living in London.