ABOUT
Day-Lewis' paintings push conventions of landscape and figuration into strange and bloody waters. Redolent of Romanticism in their search for the emotive and sublime in landscape - and punk in their embrace of the uncanny - his hallucinatory pastoral scenes are less observations of outside places than impressions of internal ones; emotional topographies brimming with the beauty and horror of existence. A deep longing pervades the work, but the object of yearning is always something just beyond reach; an amorphous place on the outskirts of civilization, or at least far, far away from his Brooklyn studio. Rendered in oil pastel on raw canvas, his tableaus are inhabited by mythical beings whose melancholic, humanoid faces emerge from quadrupedal bodies. In new works, this enigmatic personal mythology is embedded in darkly cinematic visions stemming from a fascination with the intricate dioramas of New York's Natural History Museum, which Day-Lewis frequented as a child. The spectral figures appear enclosed behind glass in desolate, primordial terrains, fixed in the gaze of mesmerized visitors. To Day-Lewis, the sublime is defined by its unattainability
Ronan Day-Lewis (b. 1998) is a New York City based painter and award winning filmmaker who grew up in rural Ireland and graduated from Yale University with a BA in Art in 2020. Day-Lewis's visual art, which Cool Hunting wrote "succeeds in transporting visitors into a universe unto itself," has been featured in publications including Artnet, Cultured Magazine, Hyperallergic, Vogue, Office Magazine, and Whitewall. In fall of 2022, he was included in an exhibition of "rising art stars" at Sotheby's. He has been the subject of solo and two-person presentations at Spring/Break Art Show in its New York City and Los Angeles locations, as well as at Tomato Mouse Gallery in Brooklyn. Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo presentation at downtown Manhattan's D.D.D.D. Gallery, and group shows at Kasmin Gallery, Winter Street Gallery, and with Galleri Urbane at Dallas Art Fair. His work as a filmmaker includes a trilogy of videos commissioned for the Philip Glass album Les Enfants Terribles, and the short film THE SHEEP AND THE WOLF, which was awarded Best Independent Short at the IFS film festival. In 2021, he directed an album video for an EP by David Chalmin, who is also the composer for Day-Lewis's upcoming feature directorial debut.
