Nomentan, 2006, oil on linen, 152x127cm

Dawson’s paintings suggest a complex hybrid world that flips between representation & abstraction refusing to be pinned down in order to satisfy an immediate desire for them to make sense. Relationships are proposed - baroque/modernism, analogue/digital, order/chaos, however rather than a diametrical opposition, they are inclined towards a symbiotic configuration unleashing a uniquely intricate experience.

This can be aligned with the transformative & fragmentary potential of experimental, electronica music which has a heavy influence on Dawson’s practice, whilst mimicking the gesture of painterly abstraction in a continuing dialogue with the (recent) history of painting. These studies then form the subject of the paintings, which represent the visual, 2-D equivalent of the spatial and audio experiences and aesthetics that are explored within the other creative, cultural practices that are referred to in the paintings. Whether it is the contradictions & immersion that arise through drone music (at once minimal and overloaded) or the distortions of the glitch – these have a profound effect on the way we experience the paintings.
As Brian Muller states in Contemporary magazine (212121 Painting: From Postconceptualism to Recontextualism, issue 58, 2003, p41) – “Sean Dawson’s multi-layered narrative & simultaneously non-narrative paintings suggest a contradictory technological construct of knowledge floating over an underlying, layered, psychoanalytic journey into one’s own inner depths, which in turn is superimposed over an imaginary world that lies somewhere between Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland and Herman Hesse’s indefinable Glass Bead Game..............

The tension between mechanical & manual manipulation in the process of the work sets up a dialogue that opens up a thinking of the operating difference between analogue & digital. The methodology (although analogous to digital technologies' infinite possibilities with respect to image manipulation of the photograph) is contradicted by the foregrounded handheld analogue process.

Ano Ona 5, 2007, oil on canvas, 150x120cm

This relationship, which focuses the viewer back onto the physicality of the process, seems to be the occasion that by disrupting the illusionary, abstracted imagery is important to the viewing event, within which another system of signification to which the work refers is suggested." In the recent work, images of modernist architecture are distorted through various pre-painting processes. Sweeps & striations are created across the already manipulated photographic image which has been transformed from 2D into a 3D form as sculptural acetate then back into 2D.