Daniel Dove
Gallery Affiliations: Cherry and Martin
Region: Pacific Coast
Website: http://www.danieldove.com/
City / State: San Luis Obispo, CA
My recent paintings depict fictional, once-grand environments that
have fallen into disrepair. Whether originally built for purposes
of entertainment, social organization, or the manifestation of
a utopian dream, these places are now marked and degraded
by natural elements and human intervention. In this respect,
they have lost their transcendence, becoming disorganized and
emphatically material—ideal subjects (in my view) to be rendered
in paint.
I often reorganize these remains using the reductive geometry
of modernist painting. As such, my work represents artifacts
from both the built environment and the history of period style.
By combining the depictive and the reflexive, I walk the edge
between painterly self-consciousness and responsiveness to the
world beyond art: specifically, our dysfunctional landscapes. I
make images of ruined things that have had their wholeness and
aesthetic vibrancy transformed and restored, even if the unity is
precarious and the beauty is strange.