Danny Leyland

About

Danny Leyland (b.1994) makes work primarily within the context of painting, but also incorporating elements of print and writing, that is centred around a personal relationship with place, and the experience of memory. 

Leyland’s paintings offer striking depictions of figures in landscapes. The inverting and overlaying of colour obfuscates direct interpretations and fragments boundaries between subjects in the painting. There is a sense of slowness activated by the painted surface of the paintings, constructed out of layered, complex marks, which invites a careful and concentrated interaction from the viewer. 

Constructed out of proliferating imagery, shifting temporalities, and a multitude of perspectives, Leyland is fascinated by the way in which particular images can seem to become resonant, and communicate themselves beyond a set of given or prescribed meanings.

In addition to using found images, Leyland often draws from personal experiences and everyday scenes, from depictions of the flats he has lived in, or moments from camping trips, to glimpses of shop windows. It is the quiet and prosaic potential of commonplace dramas which Leyland finds so fascinating, because it is often within the most domestic or mundane encounters that you can locate a sense of the numinous or spiritual. Here, Leyland’s interest in literature is significant, in particular his reading of modern poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes.

There are moments in Leylands paintings which seem to promise an imminent eruption, or contact, moments which act to collapse history upon itself, forming points of slippage where visual instances from the ancient past, or from colonial history, occur in the present. Significantly, such images of the past can often be characterised by a ghostly sense of performance, illusion, and disguise, because they are drawn from re-enactment and replica versions of historic events. Multiple temporalities occur simultaneously and, here, the past is not read like a history book, or looked at like an object in a museum to be interpreted, but experienced as a momentary encounter.