Dan Walsh

Works

The sensitivity to place in Dan Walsh’s muted, minimal paintings is surprisingly reminiscent of the way that Fra Angelico created murals for the private cells in the San Marco monastery…

The evolution of Walsh’s works, from the early 1990s to the present, has led him to abandon the concept of the "ideal" in abstract painting, which in the history of art is always somehow connected with a "psychological condition", in an attempt to give greater "weight" and "gravity" to his paintings, making them become less and less "transcendent" and more corporeal.

Dan Walsh’s large scale paintings exude a quirky brand of minimalism. In Red Diptych II Walsh presents two canvases of grid patterns contrived of the same palette: the left panel comprised of solid blocks, the right of concentric tiles. Using the multiplicity of this geometric form, Walsh’s paintings construct a phantasmal architecture: their componentised repetition suggests infinite expansion, each square mesmerising with the hypnotising glow of electric transmission. Creating optical illusions of gravity and weightlessness, Walsh’s paired canvases alternate in their perspectival deception as their flat surfaces appear to advance and recede simultaneously.

Works