Dan Walsh’s large scale paintings exude a quirky brand of minimalism. In Red Diptych II Walsh presents two canvases of grid patterns contrived of the same palette: the left panel comprised of solid blocks, the right of concentric tiles. Using the multiplicity of this geometric form, Walsh’s paintings construct a phantasmal architecture: their componentised repetition suggests infinite expansion, each square mesmerising with the hypnotising glow of electric transmission. Creating optical illusions of gravity and weightlessness, Walsh’s paired canvases alternate in their perspectival deception as their flat surfaces appear to advance and recede simultaneously.

Dan Walsh’s work resounds with an understated authority. Painted with a pristine delicacy, Walsh’s Arrangement uses the solidity of the chequered composition to create an abstracted sense of space. Divided by a liminal grid of translucent dark lines, his squares are bordered with concentrated bands of intense warm colour, weighted at their bases with striations of steely blue. Rendered by hand, Walsh’s geometric composition waivers with faint imperfection: Seemingly straight edges subtly bow and warp with undulating movement, creating a tessellated field of reverberant disorientation.

Dan Walsh’s current exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, large-scale canvases are hung mostly below eye level. In the 1980’s in Soho Alan Uglow made it a point to position his paintings below eye level, a move which not only added a sense of gravity to their bearing, but reflected the position of abstract painting at that time as being below the radar. Walsh is not the only painter to respond to Uglow’s influence.Walsh is still struggling to make a painting; in this body of work as he resolves familiar problems in unfamiliar ways that consequently open up new areas for investigation. Lots of bright colors are set in subtle and complex relationships to one another to create light in the fields underneath them. It’s an effect that gives rise to the feeling that the point of entry in Walsh’s painting is from the inside out, to be found by following the light coming from the luminous field below through to the hand drawn structure on the paintings surface.

Read Entire Article about USA Artist Dan Walsh paintings and artwork at The Saatchi-Gallery http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/dan_walsh.htm