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About Dexter Dalwood and his art

Text written by Patricia Ellis

Dexter Dalwood makes paintings of famous places he’s never seen. Offering plausible suggestions of those iconic haunts lingering invisibly in collective consciousness, Dalwood pictures his own documentation of history.

Drawing from his encyclopaedic knowledge of 20th century conspiracy theory, Dexter Dalwood constructs his scenes with forensic accuracy.

McCarthy’s living room, Kurt Cobain’s greenhouse, or Jackie O’s yacht are depicted with uncanny believability; not as real occupied places, but our media-constructed fantasies of them. Devoid of any bric-a-brac signs of human life, Dexter Dalwood pictures these lairs of rumour with Hello! magazine cleanliness; show homes of glamour, dark theme-park panoramas of gossip tourism.

Dexter Dalwood pieces together each scene with a carefully considered invention, taking into account time, location and political circumstance to devise believable tableaux which reflect the intimate details of public persona and event. Period furniture and interior décor, environmental temperament and style of paint application all give clues to his tragicomic interpretation of contemporary myth.

In developing his ideas for paintings, Dexter Dalwood creates miniature collages, virtual interiors cut and pasted from select showpieces lifted from luxury design and travel magazines. Translated into paint, Dalwood retains their awkward collaged appearance, and further pushes their displacement through his appropriated painting style. A landscape is borrowed from Munch and a set of curtains bear a strange resemblance to Richter. Through multi-layering of signifiers, Dexter Dalwood creates a fact-based fiction, entwining the convolution of pop culture with a reverence to art history.

Dalwood’s use of visual symbolism adds a profound complexity to his accursed legends. Drawing heavily from psychology, world politics, vox-pop trivia and appropriation of art history, Dexter Dalwood weaves together seemingly random elements into his own glossary of modern infamy.

Through painting, he masters the strategies of propaganda dissemination and the superfluous nature of information currency in a mass media age. Working in the traditional genre of historical painting, Dexter Dalwood presents the makings of our sociological zeitgeist as an elevated hierarchy of lasting cultural significance.

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