DAN HILLIER – FINE FEATHERED BEASTS | PRINTHOUSE GALLERY, DALSTON

Dan Hillier_Horse

Dan Hillier – Fine Feathered Beasts
Printhouse Gallery, Dalston.
1^st July – 31^st July 2011

Text by Francesca Di Fraia - Editor based in London

East London. Reminiscences of surrealist collage and Victorian prints portray masks of human faces, anthropomorphic figures dressed up like in the 1800s, heads with empty eyes surmounted by feathers, distorted visions of aristocrats. The Printhouse Gallery in Dalston is nothing but a gateway to a lost era where the spectator remains suspended between a flair of mystery and supernatural. “Fine-Feathered Beasts”, title of the exhibition, offers to its public a small but significant collection of about ten pieces, where a sublime old Victorian taste meets fine lines of ink on paper or vinyl. Dan Hillier’s works reveal a playful technique of carefully controlled drawing and collage, which make his works eclectic rather than hybrid. The artist operates almost in the attempt to reinstate a forgotten art, yet still attached to the present era and geographical place. Hillier’s works, in fact, bring together a series of motifs that were undeniably originated in the old London as described in classic literature and poetry. His work is instilled with references to a previous costume now made parallel to the contemporary society. As in the Victorian era, his pictures portray aristocrats, floral detail, abundance of botanical elements, and animals that recall the hunting tradition. His pictures, all gathered in such a compact space like the Printhouse Gallery, are displayed in a way that they seem to establish a sort of dialogue, or discourse on the myth they build when gathered together. And myth here doesn’t necessarily account for legend, as mythical is the attitude of every single character, mythical is the empty space they move in, the non-existence of the absurd society they refer to. Dan Hillier’s cosmos of renovated Victorian-like pictures appears magnetic and enigmatic, instilling in who is watching a deep sense of inquietude, also because of the total absence of chromatic variation. There is always a black figure outlined on a background which is always white. Black, the absence of colour, against white, the totality of colour. One the opposite of the other. The past, or the non-life, brought to the light of the present, the artist’s sphere of existence. The natural and human realms as well as the observation of these is together an encyclopedic look backwards and their projection towards the here-and-now. At this point, claiming that Dan Hillier’s work recalls an old spirit is utterly inaccurate. His characters, his technique, his developing collection is well part of the powerful Beat-like spirit of this part of London, Dalston. Similarly enough, Hillier’s work represents a detached look from today’s context, embodying somehow the refusal of what is accepted as “valid art” in the contemporary art market. Victorian on the surface, Beat in spirit.

Francesca Di Fraia

Further information:

Dan Hillier has recently exhibited his collection “Feather and Claws” at the Think Conservatory in New York City, and at the Wilton’s Music Hall in East London. His work has also been shown at Mu Tate Britain, the ICA and the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Links:

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