Daniel Preece – The Poetics of Absence
There is a quiet insistence in the paintings of Daniel Preece, a refusal of spectacle that makes their presence all the more resonant. His canvases are peopled not with figures but with structures: gasometers, tower blocks, shopfronts, urban margins where life has seemingly withdrawn. Yet this withdrawal opens a space for something else: a poetic charge, an uncanny sense of presence in absence.
From the outset, Preece’s practice has been shaped by observation. Trained at the Slade School of Fine Art and later the Royal Drawing School, he inherited a tradition of working from the life model and from the discipline of direct looking. And yet, as he recalls: “All work I make needs to come from something tangible and seen. Drawing is about allowing me to understand form and space through structure and line, but gives me the possibility to be present in the moment, to notice, have thoughts and make connections that eventually permeate into the work.” This dedication to drawing as a way of being in the world underpins his entire oeuvre.
The city, particularly London, has become his true life room. South London’s gasometers and tower blocks, which he once described as “urban mountains that changed with the shifting light,” entered his gaze as monumental presences, embodying both grandeur and estrangement. His later series of shopfronts carries the same ambivalence. At one level, their façades are abstract geometries of colour and line. At another, they are saturated with the social: “These shops gave me, like an abstract painting, a reflection of the society and community they flourish in. From high-end luxury to cheap fashion and alcohol, they mirror the concerns, desires and struggles of a community.”
Yet Preece resists a didactic reading. His interest is not social commentary but formal inquiry. Colour, geometry, space, and the play of light provide his true subject. “There is always a dialogue between what I am looking at and what I am trying to make. Colour can become a driving force that frames the questions I ask in the studio: How can I make the painting exist as paint and colour but have a sense of space and place?” This tension – between the observed world and the autonomy of painting – is the generative core of his work.
The effect is often one of quiet melancholy. Streets without people, structures emptied of function, evoke an atmosphere at once familiar and estranged. “There’s something about absence that feels very pertinent,” he notes, “but I can’t really explain what that is. I used to describe it as the space between me and the place.” In this in-between lies the poetry of his vision: not a record of the world as it is, but of the resonance that lingers when human presence has receded. Colour, too, carries a metaphysical weight. The strangeness of sodium streetlights turning foliage red, the uncanny glow of nocturnal cities – these are not simply optical phenomena, but portals into other states of seeing. “How do you create something believable out of colour that should not exist?” he asks. The question is at once technical and philosophical, a painter’s riddle that touches upon the very limits of perception.
Despite his rigorous training, humour and curiosity permeate his practice. He delights in the overlooked: a plastic bag snagged in a tree, a juxtaposition of shopfronts – Boots beside Burger King, health and ill-health cheek by jowl. Such moments reveal what he calls “a slightly odd, slightly oblique vision of the world” that he feels compelled to render visible. “I take what I do very seriously,” he notes, “but I don’t take myself too seriously.” This balance of rigour and lightness infuses his work. For Preece, painting is less about solving a single problem than about sustaining a dialogue – with space, with colour, with the act of seeing itself. Each canvas is both a question and a response, a way of locating himself in the world while acknowledging its vastness.
Ultimately, his paintings resist closure. Like music that lingers, they invite us back, offering new inflections each time. They are records of places, but more than records; reflections of society, but more than commentary. They are, above all, poetic spaces: contemplative, ambiguous, deeply felt – where the viewer might glimpse the world afresh, and perhaps glimpse themselves within it. This openness extends to his practice itself. He admits to having no rigid rituals, though there is a rhythm: the daily walk to the studio, “thinking time” that bridges private life and work; the act of drawing before painting, whether from observation or from a canvas in progress, as a way of re-entering thought. These modest gestures anchor his process, offering continuity amidst the uncertainty of creation.
At present, Preece is sifting through what he describes as his “visual diary”: thousands of photographs taken over the years, images that might one day become paintings. Printed out and laid side by side, they form an evolving archive. “I am trying to find visual links and see if there is any connection between how I see the world,” he explains. Though the images may at first appear disparate, they are connected by a shared formality – through geometry, colour, and a particular sense of isolation. From these groupings, he is painting quickly, testing connections, searching for what he calls “an emerging theme” that may crystallise into larger works.
These explorations have developed into new bodies of work that deepen his ongoing enquiry into how painting can convey not only the visible character of a place, but also its more intangible resonance, how it is lived, felt and remembered.
Daniel Preece paints neither grand statements nor fleeting impressions, but something both subtler and more durable: the fragile, persistent poetry of place. His paintings stand as thresholds – between presence and absence, between form and dissolution, between the world observed and the world reimagined.
