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David Caines’ figurative paintings portray real people, but they’re not showing us the real world. David sifts through hundreds of Victorian photographs, film stills and medical books looking for characters that speak to him or evoke the right atmosphere. He brings these characters together in a carefully rearranged world of anxious encounters and ambiguous ritual aiming to invoke feelings of foreboding and melancholy in us.
The pictures sit outside of a recognisable time-frame and often represent unlikely groups of curious and seemingly disparate characters (a shaman, a figure wrapped in polythene, masked children, contortionists). Their intentions are unclear. Are they welcoming committee or death squad? Entertainers or sorcerers? It is left up to us to conjure the narrative.
Other pictures suggest a fundamentally ridiculous relationship between humans and simple machinery (a woman who seems to have coalesced with her sewing machine, a headless man being led around by a wheelbarrow).
“I heard someone describe David’s work as poignant and I think that’s true… without wanting to get too deep, it seems like a comment on the human condition, that in the end we’re all alone.” Simone Pereira Hind, critic
David was born in 1963 in Wakefield, Yorkshire. His art education was at Chelsea College of Art & Design in the 80s. His work has attracted a large following and he sells his work to private collectors. Recently he has begun to curate group shows under the SALON16 banner, and in 2009 turned his house in North London into a gallery and opened it to the public. In September 2010 he curated the exhibition ‘Ordinary Monsters’ in Brick Lane, London.
Exhibitions
SALON16 presents WE WHO ARE NOT AS OTHERS, London June 2009
BHVU Open, London July 2010
SALON16 presents ORDINARY MONSTERS, London September 2010
BHVU Winter Open, December 2010
SUPERSINGULAR, BHVU, London 2011
All images © the artist. Images may not be used without permission.