Dillwyn Smith

Coloured fabric has already played an important part in Dillwyn Smith’s earlier pieces next to stitched canvases or paintings made with pigment or oil. Currently his large scale, abstract paintings develop exclusively from coloured strips of fabric that are stitched to vertical or horizontal compositions.

Always a skilled and experimenting painter, Smith has, for a quite a few years now, been almost fully dedicating himself to colour and its metaphysical values. From essences of pigments that he sprays and saturates into fabric or canvas to purely hand and pre-dyed fabrics. His paintings of homogeneous colour compositions recollect the colour fields of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Yet his works are also based on form and a special dedication to materiality and the texture of sensual surfaces. Even though Smith mainly uses straight lines and rectangular shapes, his compositions are neither geometrical nor formal, they seem on the contrary rather organic and dynamic. The assemblies of cloth panels recall rag rugs with stitches that stretch over the surface like scars or cracks in mirrors or walls.

In harmony with the organic feel, do Smith’s works emanate a warm and stimulating colour palette. The luminance and translucency of the reds, blues and yellows he employs, and even the more muted tones, communicate and contrast with each other, and emphasize the importance of light in Smith’s oeuvre. Light that moves across the surface, brings the colours to life and expands the artwork beyond itself and further. Seams are laid bare, semi-transparent fabrics are mixed in and give apertures to the image carrier and the layers beneath. Smith’s working method is immediate and always an expression of his sensibility to material.

Submitted by Patrick Heide Contemporary Art