Danny Romeril. Old New

"When making the works for this show I was thinking about the contrasts we see in our cities of old and new, especially in cities with such long histories like London."

In 2022, trees had been the predominant theme in Danny Romeril's works for more than a year. He increasingly juxtaposed these with buildings, which were initially positioned in the background and often obscured. When he moved from London to the seaside, the buildings became the focus of his interest and his preferred subject.

"The hard forms of the buildings became a way for me to further distort and dissolve the perspectives."

Romeril's houses are given structure by the windows, which divide the large areas of the buildings into small parts. Empty spaces are rarely found. Rather, a juxtaposition and overlapping of the surfaces results in a condensed occurrence. In some cases, clear structures are created by straight-lined, almost symmetrically arranged architectural elements. In other works, Romeril abandons these linear lines in favor of soft, rounded forms as well as slightly skewed arrangements.

The buildings cropped by the edge of the picture, which can be found in many of Romeril's works, make it clear that only a section is visible. The actual size of the city thus remains hidden. Occasionally, individual street lines pierce the dense throng of houses. They are monochromatic, broad areas that cross and divide the rows of buildings.

Romeril depicts an imagined city in his works. The scenes are totally imagined, although real buildings served as inspiration. Signs and shop fronts that might give clues as to what happened or is happening here are deliberately left either empty or obscure.

"I try to engage the viewer in a kind of associative game - a strange familiarity between the painted picture and a known reality. The shop looks like a shop we might know but is in fact a fallacy."

Some of the city scenes give a view of the sky between the buildings, often in dark colors. Danny Romeril does not reveal any other information about the time of day or night, the season or the life in the city. Neither on the streets nor in the houses are the people visible who live in the city. 

"If there is figure in a painting then that becomes the subject matter. But for me, the architecture is the focus in these works."