David Haines’ (1969, UK) work revolves around a relationship with the screen. This screen can be formed not only of the dark reflecting glass of a smartphone, but also of paper, canvas, paint and graphite. Images sourced from the internet often form the basis of Haines’ work, whose practice actively examines the artist’s own position as someone who makes pictorial and textual narratives in the wake of abstraction, conceptual art and photography, and whose themes include an exploration of digital identities ( the desire for the other), online communities, contemporary myths and the indexical nature the hand made image.
For the past two years David Haines has been researching the position of and possibilities for painting within contemporary digital image culture. Feeling the burden of its history, he worked his way through the canon of painterly practices, mastering the techniques of the Old Masters and arriving a language for painting which is fully grounded in today’s image culture.Haines is aware of the status of the labour-intensive medium of oil painting in the digital age, whose immersive results require ‘slow viewing’, unlocking desires and inhabiting the often-overlooked space between looking and interpretation.