Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin. 10th January – 2nd February 2019.
Through her own encounters with the Scandinavian landscape, Cecilia Danell explores the theatricality of places that become imbued with artifice, as they can’t live up to the human need for that which is primal, wild and untouched. This body of paintings is based on winter walks in the area surrounding her family farm in Sweden, where the experience of being in the landscape influences the paintings beyond the photographic source material. She walks and traces an environment that she knows intimately, happening upon decaying remnants of human activity, further upending the romantic notion of nature as untended wilderness. Foregoing the picturesque for the partial and askew, there is an appearance of melting of the landscape, suggesting an existential undoing, as well as an ongoing exploration into the possibilities of the medium of paint.
