Dan Hays

The trigger for Dan Hays ongoing series of paintings Impressions of Colorado was the discovery of his namesake on the internet. The other Dan Hays lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and runs a website dedicated to the photographic and video documentation of the local landscape. This Dan Hays, the painter, carefully re-renders the low resolution images of his website in paint, replicating the pixellated grid as hard-edge abstraction. These paintings of Romantic landscape subjects copied from the computer monitor also resemble the pointillist and Impressionist experiments of the past, although coming at form from another, contemporary direction. The visibility of his brushwork foregrounds one of the most fundamental concerns of Hays practice, namely, the rendering of the illusion of light in opaque pigment. This catalogue accompanies Dan Hays exhibitions at Manchester Art Gallery, Southampton City Art gallery and Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham, and includes an interview with the artist by Ben Tufnell.