Daniel John Gadd is a young painter whose work is already gaining traction in the US, his thickly layered paintings of friends, family and still life’s a diary of sorts, an everyday expression of who and what he comes across in his native New Jersey.
These are luxuriant pictures, they ooze, are primordial, heavily textured with the addition of found objects; glass, nails, glitter, sand, string and other materials found at the beach where he’s often found painting. The artist as beachcomber, a collector rummaging on the Jersey shore, introducing detritus to oil and spray paint, playing with it to create a picture of materiality.
This commingling of materials acts as a stamp of place, each element specific to his home, the process of making becoming a tribute, a homage to his environment.