Dan Perfect’s works merge the free-flow of painterly intuition with the visual impact of graphic design. Influenced from sources as diverse as street art, surrealism, art deco, and pop, Perfect’s abstract canvases resolve as explosions of suggestive forms and colours, each precariously balanced in the effusive currents of his compositions. Executed with flamboyant intensity, the raw energy conveyed through Perfect’s paintings reveals an engagement with both the intimacy of gesture and a coercive negotiation of mass media.

Capturing the plastic hued excess of urban cacophony and TV screen blips, Perfect’s aesthetic of spontaneous action is the result of carefully considered process. Each painting is developed from his practice of making boldly expressive ‘automatic’ drawings, elements of which are traced, overlapped, conglomerated, and modified as they are transferred onto the canvas. Coming from a background in print-making, Perfect builds up each canvas in a series of layers, concentrating on one visual component at a time and expatiating its form for maximum effect.

Treating each motif as an individual entity, Perfect’s paintings present a chaotic sensation of spatial disorientation and weightlessness, as if arresting the velocity of imagination in freeze frame. Through combining flat fields of colour, delicate washes, and fervid brush strokes, with elements of heavily outlined illustration and ephemeral drawing, Perfect contrives a lexicon of painterly expression, reworking the signifiers of contemporary experience as consumables for infatuation and compulsion.