New work in the lower gallery –
I call these paintings “industrial landscapes” which is just an easily identifiable label. What these paintings are is something more than a technical rendering of a scene. Some of these paintings are based on real places, photos taken by Czech photographer Viktor Mácha. Others are altered versions of real steel mills and foundries, yet others totally imagined and verging on abstract. Some of these mills and smelting facilities have been shut down and sold off as the world moves away from that foundational industrial society. What remains, for most of us, are these visuals of a distant world: dark and strange machines, dangerous and seemingly autonomous, glowing with an unimaginable heat of molten metal used to build the foundations of a physical world most of us are now only distantly connected to.
The subjects of these paintings are these alien machines and their atmospheric habitats. They are massive and mysterious. They have an autonomous nature defined by an inhumanness, yet the glowing metal coursing through them indicates a life force within. The contrast is not purely aesthetic. The coldness enclosed around the heat resonates on a human level. Allow yourself to interpret and judge these paintings in a personal way, see where they lead. – Dave