DANIEL MILTON

"DANIEL MILTON's recent work defies any traditional attempt at categorisation. Photograph, collage, or painting, visual diary or surrealistic venture – the work is a fusion of technique and theme.

Combining his own favourite photographs from many thousands taken each year Milton builds up a digital collage which is then printed on canvas and to which he makes selective painted interventions in acrylic. In the resulting work it can be difficult to distinguish photography from painting and this deliberate confusion extends to the meaning of the work; what is “real” and what is “fiction”? A surreal confusion pervades all; the photographic record often appearing more extraordinary than the painted intervention.

Milton says, “A big inspiration for me is the traces of humans in urban environments. The colours and patterns on a wall after hundreds of posters and stickers have been torn away. Or graffiti tags on an old door.” This inspiration is interpreted in Milton 's work into a contemporary world where rapid change and alienation are puzzles, even predicaments. In his use of contrast and collage, headlong perspective and slight visual distortion of the painted image, Milton confronts the viewer with a world which is in overdrive and where nothing is quite as it seems; history is confounded and order is displaced.

However, any attempt to entirely delimit the thematic in this way meets with a resistance; also making a spectacular, as a contrast to the concrete and steel of urban decay, are paradisiacal flashes from the natural world, represented in jewel-like colour; iridescent fish or flocks of black crows fly through the skies, turquoise waves splash against the edges of the canvas and golden harvested fields retreat into infinity. Thus, each layered image contains within itself the fullness and the completeness of life-experience and this sub-imagery, placed in opposition to the representation of urban despair, introduces the idea of hope implicit in the natural world.

Operating in our artificial borderlands between the industrial and the natural Daniel Milton has created a visual world where nothing is quite as it seems, and yet, much is expressed about what it is to be living in the here and now of our contemporary world." (Jo Rose, Gallery Uusitalo)

DANIEL MILTON
BORN 1974
EDUCATION
2003 - 2005 Art school of Öland , Sweden
2002 - 2003 Blekinge art school, Sweden
2000 - 2002 Various courses in graphic design, Sweden


☁ DANIEL MILTON