The new body of drawings by artist David Haines (1969, GB) are predicated upon skilfully rendered archetypal narratives following in the wake of abstraction, conceptual art and photography. His work ties itself to the gravity of painting within the
context of the new information age and digitally overloaded image culture. Invested in the history of European painting, Haines has arrived at a language for painting, which not only speaks to the ancestor spirits of Holbein, Hals, Vermeer, but is also fully grounded in today’s image driven and technological consumer society.
In computer interface terminology the term greyed out indicates that a function is no longer available. The viewer can see the function and try to interact with it but it remains inactive, muted, cancelled, postponed.The artist’s series Greyed Out was made during
the recent lockdowns. In this ‘new normal’ shiny balloons hang in the darkness of a cancelled celebration. Others spell out the year, or signify a birthday - caught in the dulled flash of a camera and lit for a split second they are fated to be be plunged immediately back into darkness.