White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
In this decayed hole among the mountains
- TS Eliot, The Wasteland
Danny Moynihan has been making art for fifty years, from childhood prodigy to his precocious days as a teenage star at the renowned Slade school of art in London, yet this is his first solo exhibition in continental Europe; in lieu of any full retrospective this show rightfully concentrates on his most recent and arguably most potent work whose sheer strangeness proves as irresistible as its bravura technique.
The context is somewhat set by a couple of earlier paintings of stones from 2002 and a handful of paintings depicting just caves without any figures, perhaps from before humans or even animals existed. Moynihan is clearly interested in the ‘natural’ world, in geology and land, rocks and earth, and this is an attraction not only to the shape and colour and texture of their presence, the sheer painterly pleasure in thus depicting them, but also to their deeper meaning, their physical structure, essentialism, their underpinning of our own much later and fleeting existence.
These images of caves and stones may be based on actual existent examples, from Morocco or the South of France, both landscapes Moynihan has long inhabited, but though their mimetic skill is unquestionable they are not fundamentally concerned with mere verisimilitude, with accurate depiction.
Instead they are about the larger meaning, the vaster resonance, mythic reach, of such nature and our place within it as humans, as strangers to this harsh if not hostile world; yet strangers who have emerged ourselves from these very desert portals, and the only strangers capable of consciously observing and recording this alien home around us.
The majority of works here on display, produced in the last few years, reveal this same rugged landscape, this pre-human if not prelapsarian terrain but now inhabited, overtaken, by some living spirit embodied by a melée of mysterious mingled species; here we bear witness to some unnameable vital force whose violence and defiance is both overwhelming and all too familiar to our human eye.
Moynihan has recently become intrigued by Jungian Archetypes, lurking in such tropes as the Ouroboros or indeed Cleopatra and some images are loosely based on a mammal called Lystrosaurus an ancient species that somehow survived the great extinction-event and roamed the earth, almost entirely alone, 200 million years ago. But whatever their source, inspiration, these paintings are unquestionably uncanny and all the more exciting, impressive, precisely for their inexplicable origins, their bold originality.
This literal ‘body’ of work, could be approached variedly through psychoanalysis, geology, archaeology, art history, mythology, anthropology or zoology. Their active tactile presence, encrusted loam outcrop, rocky erotics, antediluvian downpour, give birth to an oeuvre of notable cohesion.
The very opposite, antidote, to artificial intelligence or digital simulacra, we witness here the emergence of a visceral form of life beyond the anthropomorphic privileging of our own race, a landscape inseparable from sentient existence where animal and human are one, a world now come into being or its final conclusion.
Adrian Dannatt
Danny Moynihan (b. 1959, lives and works in New York, NY, US) studied at Slade School of Art, London, UK. Moynihan has had solo exhibitions at Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY, US; Anne Faggionato, London, UK; Grob Gallery, London, UK and Magrath Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, US. Group exhibitions and curatorial projects include exhibitions at Palo Gallery, New York, NY, US; Nino Mier Gallery, New York, US; Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Paris, FR; Kasmin Gallery, New York, US and Rove Gallery, New York, US. In addition to his visual art, Moynihan is also an accomplished writer and filmmaker, known for Boogie-Woogie (2010) and Me and Me Dad (2012). His projects were nominated for prestigious award at the Cannes International Film Festival in France and the Brisbane International Film Festival in Australia. Prometheus is his first solo exhibition with Nino Mier Gallery.