ART CRITICISM

Daniel Pulman: Night Paintings

For ART SOLO 2023, Chini Gallery presents "Night Paintings", a series of paintings by the British artist, Daniel Pulman. These paintings were begun in 2020 after the artist had spent the winter traveling from city to city in Japan, South Korea and North East China and returned to Taiwan on the eve of the pandemic. From this experience, and the long period of unease and uncertainty that followed emerged a series of paintings depicting urban landscapes undergoing the transformation of winter and of night.

 

Thick layers of paint create a textured surface to convey the physicality of the snow covering the roads and sidewalks and the gritty, industrial feel of the cityscape. Muted colors capture the soft alien glow of streetlights reflected in the snowy ground. Figures are seen moving and encountered, emerging through the glare of car headlights, from out of a blizzard, or scurrying below tower blocks; individual human presences in the night, traversing cold post-industrial cities.

 

The image of a solitary walker maps a path through the urban nightscape, conveys rhythm, or represents time as a frozen frame in a temporal sequence. These walking figures also mirror the artist's act of walking across numerous cities, observing, photographing, and thinking on a journey. Pulman believes that to be authentic, art must be rooted in direct experience, and the landscape, the images of people, and walking figures, which are a reoccurring theme, all come from real encounters and events along the journey.

 

As with all journeys, the journey is both physical and psychological, having an aspect of being a journey into oneself. Traveling long distances in faraway places, which are at once strange and familiar, one explores the personal history within and the physical history and geography of the exterior without. These paintings are a response to such a journey and are imbued with a sense of stillness and quiet, but also show movement and solitude in the open spaces of a city and of a world, which is undergoing change.

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