Royal College of Art Presents David Hanes, I Look in London

The Royal College of Art presented I Look by David Hanes as part of the MA Painting Postgraduate Show in London, on view 18 to 21 June 2026.

A painting can work like a diary entry that skips the words. What survives is the fact of a moment, and the colour it left behind. That is a small claim for a picture to make, and it turns out to be enough.

For the MA Painting Postgraduate Show at the Royal College of Art, David Hanes hung twenty small oil paintings in a tight grid on a single white wall. From across the room the installation reads as a field of colour, almost abstract.

Up close, each canvas opens into its own scene, with forests, cabins, mountains, a river and fragments of built space. All of them come out of studies made across five years of travel, repainted at the scale of a postcard and framed in plain oak.

In I Fear Safety, an orange cabin with a mint green roof sits low in night snow, the forest behind it built from near-black violet strokes. The windows stay dark. The house glows without inviting.

Placeless pushes furthest from description, an ochre diagonal cutting through layers of teal, closer to a stain than a view, and the title does the rest. In Waiting for the Thaw, an orange sun radiates over a cold river in streaks that take up half the canvas, weather turned into directional mark.

The title of the show points to On Kawara and his logging of bare existence, date by date. Hanes borrows the notation, each painting stating I looked here, then floods it with temperature.

Colour announces not what was seen but what it felt like to see it. At a moment when most travel images are made in half a second and scrolled past in less, spending five years returning to the same encounters is its own position. These are places filtered through memory and distance until only the essential heat remains.

Sketches Carried for Years

David Hanes, born 1987 in Toronto, is a Canadian and American painter based between London and Berlin.

His process begins outdoors, with hand-held observational sketches made on site during his travels, quick notes of light, colour and atmosphere.

He sometimes holds on to them for years before they resurface in the studio as colour-driven oil paintings. Shelters, horizons, forests and skies keep coming back, out of concern rather than nostalgia. "Painting is my exchange with a vital and restless world," he says.

The degree show lasted four days. The paintings, small enough to carry, look built for a longer trip. Read the full interview at Catapult Contemporary: David Hanes: A Global Journey Through Paint and Memory.

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