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.