Curated by Isabel de Vasconcellos
Varvara Roza Galleries is delighted to present an exhibition of recent paintings by acclaimed Jamaican-born British artist Anthony Daley.
Known for his intense relationship with colour and engagement with the traditions of European Old Master Painting, Resonance deploys these characteristics across the three spaces at 8 Duke Street St. James’s in a staging of Daley’s artistic vision at its most vivid and assured.
Daley’s painterly drive pits figuration against abstraction, where the dynamics of colour are unleashed to invoke, enrapture and confound. Through them, Anthony Daley bypasses frameworks of meaning and interpretation, layering stroke upon stroke until figure and ground deliquesce, and colour itself becomes the carrier. The material qualities of oil paint, and of the physical act of applying it, are recorded on the canvas through sinewing strokes, scumbles; layers built up and scraped away. Occasionally, Daley’s mastery and control give way to passages of improvisation where gravity settles the score – but only with permission.
Daley’s large canvases are disarmingly, unapologetically beautiful. They draw the viewer into the mechanics of seeing, focusing and refocusing until at length the eye abandons itself to pure and unmediated vision. In this release, a new way of seeing becomes possible: where perception is the guide, and through it, the painting reveals its layered possibilities.
The artist’s brushwork is imbued by a lifelong engagement with the techniques of the Dutch and Italian Masters, which has accompanied and inspired him since he first discovered reproductions of them as a child in Jamaica.
Daley’s stated ambition is to set his work in dialogue with these traditions. This intention found its most explicit mature expression in Son of Rubens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (2022-23), drawing on works in the gallery’s collection. In this sense, Daley’s paintings inhabit a visual continuum with those of Delacroix, who himself took the works of Rubens as a starting point from which to exploit the emotional and experiential qualities of colour. “We all paint in Delacroix's language” said Cezanne, so drawing a direct line through the 19th century to today.
The works in Resonance, realised in 2024 – 2025, push the figurative elements in Daley’s canvases even further to dissolution. Fragments and echoes play out in a bravura performance of visual exuberance.
