Changing Room Gallery x The House of St Barnabas presents ‘About Town’, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Danny Romeril. The exhibition takes deeper look into Romerils approach to the languages of painting. Through his dynamic and fluid renditions of everyday life, Romeril challenges traditional representations of reality, creating a thought-provoking visual language.
Romeril's work is rooted in an awareness of the inherent falseness of the painted picture, and seeks to reinterpret physical reality in terms of planes of form and space. He draws on the bold linear quality, deliberate jarring contouring, and intentional naivety of Picasso and early Hockney, and still life paintings exhibit a deliberate clunkiness.
The scenes depicted in Romeril's paintings are often inspired by music or everyday life, and his messy and colourful forms capture the essence of both. His compulsive nature as a maker ensures that he is always creating something, in one form or another. The result is a body of work that is deeply authentic, and that challenges viewers to question their perceptions of the world around them.
Romeril's most recent works were created after he moved out of London at the beginning of 2022. The experience of moving to a place that was nowhere near the size of the metropolis led to a shift in the artist's approach. Where his paintings had once felt cramped and claustrophobic, the move to the seaside and the openness of Thanet allowed the images to open up. Solitary buildings, with signs of their previous existence as garages or factories, and empty windows that suggest an existence on the other side with stories we will never know about, tell their own stories.
Most of the buildings depicted in Romeril's work are imagined, though some are pulled from real locations or faintly remembered passings-by. The geography of where the artist lives is a vehicle for him to explore the painterly language in his works. A physical or, in some cases, non-physical space allows for the image to be pushed and pulled to the point of recognition or total abstraction.
Colour and shape take precedence, with the angular and solid nature of the architecture contrasting with the natural forms of trees or clouds of smoke. "About Town" invites us to see the world in a new way, challenging us to question our perceptions and embrace a more authentic way of seeing.
