Sharks Eat Meat: DANIEL DOVE

Friday, September 1, 2017

DAY 2504 - Odeon - REVIEW

REVIEW

by John Coulter

Artist Daniel Dove’s landscapes rearrange industrial spaces, construction sites and suburban sprawl to form new imagery. Dove paints familiar yet disjointed places. Although the environments don’t exist, with just enough use of of trompe-l’oeil, Dove invites viewers into a believable world where feverish colored objects are stitched together to create unfamiliar relationships. The works resemble the layers of stained glass stacked atop one another.

The works simultaneously address representational reality and entirely painterly qualities. Sentry has all the elements of a natural landscape: hazy clouds, silhouetted plant-life, and soft homes in the distance. Yet, all are compositionally eschewed, allowing the viewer to reconstruct the scene.

In Lindisfarne a waterslide hovers atop a graffiti covered pool in a heat wave. Harsh shadows and colorful details bring a realness to the alien space, where city blocks, patches of grass, wires and more are all proudly in the wrong place.

Dove’s Megalopolis layers multiple scenes of street signs, power lines and other industrial elements on top of each other like stacked acetate transparencies. There is a fluidity to the state of objects, creating the idea of a space but nothing concrete. These transitional elements allude to a passing of time and change.

Follow Daniel Dove on his website and on SharksEatMeat.