Danny Romeril, Double Self Portrait, 2025, oil on panel, 30.5 × 23cm
Danny Romeril, Midden 3, 2025, oil on canvas, 155 × 120cm
Danny Romeril
His work is rooted in layering, collage, and reworking. Flattened picture planes and simplified forms create a shorthand vocabulary of recurring motifs. A devoted music lover, Romeril frequently incorporates musical instruments and musicians into his compositions. These motifs — instruments, characters, and scenes — reappear across his works not as fixed symbols but as quotations, each time reimagined within a new context.
Recent works delve into “in-between” spaces: the tension between what is seen and what is concealed, what is remembered and what is distorted. Drawing from both real and imagined imagery, Romeril creates compositions that exist in a liminal zone, resisting resolution into either representation or abstraction. With their rhythmic repetition of forms and shifting play between memory and invention, his works conjure a universe of interconnected scenes and objects.
A: Unspoken codes are for me the parameters in which we engage with the world around us. When moving around an urban landscape we are faced with physical, visible barriers that hide what’s behind them, be that a front door, gate, face or any other form of barrier. These guide us through the world, defining what we can and cannot see. What we can’t see leads to the mystery of spaces and places that we can only investigate through imagination and invention. Although it is possible to visit these places, the unspoken codes of the psycho-geography of the human realm limit this exposure. This, I think, is where the possibility of the mental exploration of space exists, wondering what is behind that door you walk past every day, what’s over the fence or who lives there?
Q: How does your practice, or this particular work, engage with or respond to these codes?
A: My paintings explore the in-between space between the visible and hidden parts of the world in which we inhabit, as well as between the real memory of a place and space and the later reimagined and skewed memory of it. Be this a private moment in a messy room or the facade of a building that we cannot enter. Utilising imagined as well as real images interchangeably, my artworks aim to sit in the in-between space. They are neither real in their representation of a space or totally separated from it by abstraction. Sitting on the proverbial fence of what is there and what could be there, what has been or hasn’t been. In some respects, the painting wants to toe this line like a tight rope walker swaying between the two in the wind.
Q: How do you navigate the balance between individuality and collective life — finding and standing by your own voice while also being connected to and supported by others?
A: Humans are naturally social animals, so community is one of the most important things to me as an artist. The shared venture of the artists we know, have known, will know and may never know is something that inherently exists in all creative endeavours. No person is an island, and no creative act can be made in a bubble. Personally, I am open about the artists I look at for inspiration because I’m well aware that no matter how hard you try, it is futile to think that something is not connected to something else. The red string on the pinboard of the history of art connects the dots between each artist and their own individual expression, and although the web is different for everyone, this web exists even if it is kept hidden from the public view.
Q: What has your path as an artist revealed to you about resilience, belonging, or empowerment in your own life?
A: Being an artist is about failing, and constantly failing then finally failing a little less till the point that it can be, within your own parameters, be considered a success. Art making is like alchemy. Something has to be created that hasn’t existed before. Even when an artist establishes systems to work through challenges, and even if those protocols are followed precisely every time, the results will still vary. The green may be slightly tonally different, the mark made by the paint brush thicker or thinner than last time. Art making has taught me resilience: you have to accept defeat. You can stare at a painting for hours or years, but if it’s not working and there’s no way out, it’s over — and that’s okay. You just have to go back to the start and try a different route.
Q: Can you share what guided your choice of the work included in Unspoken Codes, and what you hope it might evoke for viewers?
A: The works I’ve selected are paintings that sit in that space between the real and the unreal. The figure in the room with the pile of collected stuff in Midden 3 exists in this grey area. Midden, a Middle English term for a refuse heap, refers to places where everyday objects such as shells, bones, or scraps were discarded in archaeology. The word is still used today, especially in Scotland, to describe a messy room, for example, “this room is a midden.” The scene isn’t real. Instead, it's a total synthesis of a space which could or could not exist behind closed doors. Double self-portrait in the show is also in this in-between state. It is impossible to have myself represented next to myself in this manner in the real physical world, but it’s totally acceptable when translated into paint on canvas. I hope viewers take whatever they like from these paintings. I don’t want to dictate what people should see in the paintings, as at the end of the day, they aren’t messengers. They are just minor side characters in the wider performance of art marking and open vessels for interpretation.