Andrew Dadson Colour Field

In his second solo exhibition with Daniel Faria Gallery, Vancouver-based artist Andrew Dadson’s Colour Field features a new series of paintings and photographs that explore his deep interest in the forces shaping the natural world. With these powerful natural processes as his impetus, he creates artworks that investigate and reflect on the landscape, and highlight a constantly changing environment.

In his new “wave” paintings (2024), Dadson incrementally builds up layers of oil and acrylic on linen using a pallet knife. Below their monochromatic surfaces are hidden layers of kaleidoscopic colour, the works undergoing a shift in colour as each layer covers the last. Hints of this history still shimmer through, as, upon closer inspection, we may find traces of blues, yellows, and pinks under a seemingly white surface. The lines at the bottom of the canvas are the heaviest, mimicking gravity’s pull. The durational quality of these works—the repetition of gesture through which they take form—reflects the slow, geological effects of time on the earth’s varied surfaces. But rather than recreate the appearanceof such natural phenomena, Dadson recreates their processes. From a distance, his abstract paintings could be read as lines in the sand left by the changing tides, ripples from the wind passing over a field of grass, or, zooming out further, mountain ranges and valleys as seen from an aerial perspective. Dadson’s works often contain both these perspectives—the macro and micro—the texture of each grain of sand or clump of earth, and also the colossal dunes and ridges they form.   

The four photographs presented in the exhibition (all 2023) contend with similar notions of nature and time, while also bringing in the relationship between human beings and the landscape. The series features grasses from a Vancouver farmland under threat of development due to the expansion of the nearby highway. Dadson uses a natural, biodegradable pigment to paint patches of the grasses, which he then photographs, the evidence of his mark-making eventually washed or blown away by the elements. Formally, the resulting works are more in conversation with the history of abstract painting than they are landscape photography. Around each painted patch is a frame of green, untouched landscape, a brief suggestion of scale beyond the camera’s lens. The horizon is only visible at the very top of the image, which has a flattening and abstracting effect, pushing the viewer right up against the literal field of colour. Displayed in a row, the photographs in this series create a more expanded view, as though offering window-glimpses at a larger world beyond.

Presented together, the photographs and paintings generate a contemplative space of immersion in nature’s forces, highlighting both its tenuous, fragile state within the current human moment, and its epic, persistent mutability and power.

Presented by Daniel Faria Gallery