Damn Idle Eyes – Jack Dunnett

Damn Idle Eyes is a show of paintings focusing on tensions and balances within Painting. Created throughout 2022, this exhibition of new work by Jack Dunnett is a continuation of an ongoing investigation into quotidian aspects of everyday life.

Featuring paintings that use a variety of familiar materials and motifs in order to create unexpected pairings, these works explore subjects that are often considered mundane, ordinary or bleak, through a lens of cautious irreverence.

By playing with familiarity, Dunnett explores how perceptions of domesticity can shift and change over time, whilst also touching on the absurdity involved in one’s ever-changing impression of comfort or security. He uses painting as a vehicle for both critique and introspection, exploring our relationships with that which we may damn, yet simultaneously idolise. Through the levity of the banal and questioning our perception of time and materials, the viewer is invited to experience a familiar yet foreign connection with their surroundings.

The work ranges from figuration to abstraction, using materials such as paint, brick, plaster, rubber, varnishes and various detritus, in ways that may be obvious or go unnoticed.
“I make paintings that are rooted in the commonplace. I aim to investigate the fraught and complex circumstances of being a human in a material world, with all of its obfuscations and impulses. I paint on a variety of materials and objects to explore these moments from within an idiosyncratic perspective”

A collection of portraits; interiors; abstracted landscapes; social commentary and a touch of the absurd, the paintings encompass different approaches, yet share a common thread. They are pulled together by an unreliable narrator; as if scenes from a world which is detached from our own, but rooted in direct experience of it. Scenes of places which are other-worldly, yet have essences of familiarity. Narratives which forever remain indefinite yet profess that there is a story to be told.

Jack Dunnett was born in Wick in 1995. He achieved his BA in Painting at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen in 2017. Dunnett has exhibited in a number of exhibitions throughout the UK and Europe and has been the subject of the solo shows ‘Ouroboros’ (2017), and ‘Metanoia’ (2019) in Aberdeen and Edinburgh respectively. His work has been awarded the Royal Scottish Academy Keith Prize for best student work from a Scottish Art School at the RSA New Contemporaries; the David and June Gordon Memorial Trust Award; the ACT Aberdeen Graduate Award; and the ENGIE E&P Scholarship and Purchase Prize. He currently lives and works in Glasgow.