Dan HAYS - Paysages Fugitifs

Press release

Jean-luc and Takako Richard are thrilled to present Dan Hays’ first solo show at Galerie Richard titled Landscapes from March 12 to April 30, 2022. Since 1999 the British artist has been painting mostly landscapes from digital screens, carefully representing pixels or RVB colors dots. Dan Hays is part of this generation of artists, like all other users in this interactive environment, who mirrors and reconstructs our world, integrates digital vision in the field of painting. 

This exhibition also pays homage to Joe Houston, who curated the show titled “Post-Digital Painting” at The Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomsfield Hills, MI, USA in 2002-03 and was influential on the gallery’s program. In the catalogue’s exhibtion Joe Houston wrote the following introduction to Dan Hays’s paintings: 

“While surfing in the internet one day in 1999, Dan Hays, a London-based painter, happened upon a website maintinaed by Dan Hays, a Boulder-based computer executive. The site included an online gallery of webcam images of the Rocky Mountain landscape captured over a period of several years from the window of the Hays’s family home. These compressed and distorted pictures caught the attention of the British artist who had long been fascinated by images filtered through print and electronic media. He received permission via email to use several of these unassuming snapshots as material for his next series of paintings. 

Hays obsessively mapped these low-res mountain scenes onto canvas by carefully articulating each pixel in oil paint, ironically mimicking digital processing techniques ith his brush. In its rigorous interrogation of his monolithic subject, Hays’ Colorado Impression series owes an obvious debt to Cezanne’s Mont St. Victoire paintings of a century ago. His pictorial digitilization can indeed be viewed as a 21st-century extension of the Post-Impressionist impulse to methodically deconstruct the visual field. Viewed from a distance as panoramic vistas, the paintings become geometric patterns close up, achieving a delicate balance between the diverse traditions of romantic realism and formalist abstraction. 

Painted again and again, Hays’ reconstituted landscapes begin to dissolve in the process of their own engineering. Sky and tree become equally reduced to visual code. This image of the wilderness is a fleeting and fragile one that has to be scanned, processed and transmitted through virtual space. Through the material act of painting, Hays finds a means by which to intricately reconstruct the technologically mediated realm of nature and dowload onto canvas its flickering remains, bit by bit.” 

Born in London in 1966, Dan Hays studied BA fine Art at the Goldsmith’s College, London, and  got a PhD in Fine Art  at Kingston University. He lives in London. He has a long listing of exhibitions in England, but also in the USA, Germany, France, Holland, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, United Arab Emirates, South Korea…He had three solo shows at Galerie Zürcher in Paris and new York. He is part of two recent museum shows in France, 2022 Peinture Obsolescence déprogrammée -Licences libres in Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch, Issoudun, and Peinture: Obsolescence déprogrammée in Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Sables d’Olonne in 2021. His works are in the following collections : Tate Gallery, Arts Council Collection, Southamton City Gallery, Walker Art Gallery, Saatchi Collection, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Victoria & Albert Museum.