Daniel Dove: Reviving the Ruins of Mid-Century Modernism

Daniel Dove, Eviction. | Image: Courtesy of the artist.

If theres a label Daniel Dove is leery of, its ruin porn. The term, the San Luis Obispo artist says, is associated with urban explorers who venture into forgotten places -- abandoned subway stations, desolate diners, moldering movie theaters and the like -- and snap photos of them.

There can be something very moralizing about it, the Cal Poly art professor said, citing an approach in which a contemplation of manmade structures becomes a contemplation of our excesses. The position from which that judgment is made, if that is the only operative thing in the artwork, is one of wagging ones finger and tsk-tsking us, scolding us for having felt confident. It casts all of our ambitions and confidence in terms of hubris.

Dove's paintings seek to sidestep that moralizing squint by finding a melancholic beauty in the artifacts of one of the art world's most optimistic movements: high modernism. Picture a scuffed abstract sculpture plopped in the middle of a nondescript industrial park, a sinuous swimming pool covered in graffiti or mid-century Danish furniture dumped in a haphazard pile.

Even if it's melancholic and even if it's ruined, I want there to be a possibility of something hedonistic too, Dove explained, whether it's the optical pleasure of color or surface, [or] my commitment to beautiful form.

San Luis Obispo artist Daniel Dove. | Image: Courtesy of the artist.

That attitude is evident in Dove's self-titled solo show, running May 1 through May 29 at Left Field gallery in San Luis Obispo. The exhibition features a couple of full-sized, finished works as well as a series of smaller studies and sketches that offer a glimpse of the painter's detailed process.

I wanted to show Daniel's work because he's one of the best -- if not the best -- painters we have in our region, said Left Field owner Nick Wilkinson, an abstract artist based in Los Osos. First off, the guy is smart as a whip. He not only knows his role and his place in the contemporary art world but he [also] knows about art history... What sets him apart from other painters is his knowledge, his seriousness about painting.

Moreover, Wilkinson added, He's just a master with paint. The way the guy makes paint move is a real thing.

Dove may speak in the measured tones of a born academic, but his path as an artist wasn't always assured. I didn't grow up in a family that cared about art. We didnt have any. We never looked at it. We never talked about it, said Dove, who grew up in Austin, Texas. I didnt understand the ways that living life as an artist could possibly be viable.

In fact, he entered college as a chemistry student. After a year of this and the attendant unhappiness that comes from doing the wrong thing with your life, I decided to switch to being an art major, he said, and started painting.

Dove now holds a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Texas in Austin and a master of fine arts degree in painting from Yale University. He spent five years as an assistant art professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art before joining Cal Polys faculty in 2005. (Sick of the murderous winter weather, I did a faculty search from Cleveland just for places based on the amount of sunshine they had, he said, and discovered California's Central Coast by chance.)

Dove recently sat down in his San Luis Obispo studio to chat with Artbound about his work.

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Where did your fascination with ruins come from?

Its always been part of my life, and was part of my life as somebody in high school whos driving around at night [in a late-1980s Chevrolet Monte Carlo] and finding empty parking lots and just sitting there thinking about life, listening to Depeche Mode

My introverted nature made me feel much more comfortable being alone as a child, and therefore I was always seeking out places where I could be alone -- which naturally puts you in situations that are useless to other people. Its after the party has ended, once the utility of the place is gone or once the commerce has stopped...

The way I view the beauty is when I am physically present in one of those spaces. This can be triggered by something as mild as being in an empty parking lot at night. It doesnt even require ruins. It just requires perhaps an experience with a public space that actually feels very private. The beauty and the sadness of that, the loneliness of that [is] intertwined.

Is that why there are no people in your paintings?

The things I paint seem to be on a human scale or larger, and also seem to have been designed for human pleasure or human contemplation in that they are of the built environment. They were made for people. And its a curious absence that there arent any people in them...

Ones confrontation with a modernist painting is oftentimes about ones physical body in front of a thing. This is definitely true of minimalism; because its so reductive in its form, it activates the space between the viewer and the object. When you look at a Pollock or a Rothko, it is this one-to-one relationship between an object and the body of the reviewer. I think Im trying to call on that.

Somehow putting a figure in there would push the paintings more thoroughly toward the world of depiction and pull them away from the world of abstraction. Im trying to walk a knife edge between the two.

Daniel Dove, Lindisfarne. | Image: Courtesy of the artist.

Why high modernism?

There is an aspect of my work that always has to do with abstract structures that come out of high modernism. I may be depicting the artifacts of high modernism as if they are ruins and therefore implying that the game is up historically, that what we thought was going to be this apex of our culture might someday be something that is abandoned, t

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