Gordon Dalton
“The paintings are not directly images of certain paintings or places, but rather an idea of a place and the melancholy of longing and wanting to belong. An unfashionable romanticism grounded in the act of painting.”
Gordon Dalton’s contemporary interiors and landscape paintings reveal traces of style and form from the Nabis, Fauvism and twentieth century Abstraction, a captivating orchestration of impasto, areas of bare canvas and an expressive use of colour.
This sensibility is seen in series of intimate domestic scenes, sections of flat rendering creating fluidity between exterior and interior spaces. This stylistic approach reveals the artist’s interest in the Japanese tradition of landscape, what he describes as “an epic landscape, multiple horizons and perspectives, all flattened down into one image.”
Indeed, the places depicted in Dalton’s pictures reside somewhere between fantasy, nostalgia and a decorative beauty. The artist notes he combines memories of places he has lived, revisited and “long longingly imagined as well as references to significant places and art history.” In schematically composed landscapes in harmonious yet contrasting hues, Dalton lays out scenes of patterned splendour, trees among area of biomorphic pools of colour, outlined in black. A certain dynamism of line recalls the extravagantly detailed and gorgeous work of Édouard Vuillard but now with a certain inflection of the calligraphy of artists like Cy Twombly.
The artist works in various formats, often beginning with a series of small canvas paintings and eventually transitioning to large studies of the same subject matter. Much of his approach is spontaneous, expressed as such in work that artfully plays with the tension of decorative form and painterly expressionism.
Rosa JH Berland
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Dalton has earned an international reputation for his resplendently coloured paintings. He holds his MA, Fine Art, University of Northumbria, and an honours BA, Fine Art, University of Wales, Cardiff. Select residencies include URRA, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2016 and the Chapter Art Gallery, Cardiff, 2007.
Select solo exhibitions:
Gallagher & Turner, Newcastle 2022
The Auxilliary, Middlesborough 2020
Bay Art, Cardiff 2017
Trade Gallery, Nottingham 2016
Last Gallery, Llangadog 2015
Bank Gallery, Los Angeles 2011
Keith Talent, London 2010
Castlefield Gallery, Manchester 2010
Moot Gallery, Nottingham 2008
Marksman Gallery, Reading 2007
Select group shows:
Royal Academy Summer Show, London 2017/2022
Beep Wales Painting Prize, Swansea 2022
Newcastle Contemporary 2022
Artworks, Halifax, 2022
Unit 1, London, 2021
Terrace Gallery, London, 2021
Pineapple Black, Middlesbrough 2018
Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance 2017
Contemporary British Painting Prize, London 2016
Del Infinito Art Gallery, Buenos Aires 2017
MIMA, Middleborough 2016
National Eisteddfod of Wales, Abergavenny 2015
Exeter Contemporary Open 2015
Bankley Open, Manchester 2016
Transition, London 2015
Syson, Nottingham 2016
Galerie Skuc, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2013
Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York 2012
Moravian Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic 2003
Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania 2003