Elisa

There’s this tension between seeing, remembering, and dissolving, in the work of David Downs.

His monothones paintings represent fragments of reality eradicated from their context, and by focusing on psychologically charged details. 

There’s a melancholic tone of desolation, in most of these images, that usually characterize something lost. In fact, these images appear on the canvas as fragmented memories do in our head, when we try to dig into what is gone. 

As the details progressively dissolve with time, we try to save the general impressions and emotions surrounding these shadows from being submerged by the oblivium. 

Sometimes Downs bends on the canvas also some found objects and fragments from the material  world, creating complex existential assemblages which seek to give substance to these memorial images. 

Titles are also highly evocative, activating and suggesting all a series of meanings for the viewer in approaching these images, and interiorizing them.