The Everyday Fantastic is a research project that began in 2006, and debuted as a solo exhibition with related lectures and artist talks in 2009 at the Marlborough Gallery, London.
David Rayson continues to explore through his studio-based research the relationships between narrative story-telling, figuration and abstraction, and the artists relationship to the vernacular landscape. This takes the form of small-scale drawings with reoccurring themes centering upon the built suburban environment.
The research draws upon the history of narrative image and the graphic cannon where the visual language deployed becomes a bespoke and original lexicon, enhancing the terms of engagement in the development of communication. Artists as far reaching such as the social realist/political graphic works of Hogarth, Goya, Rowlandson, Cruikshank, Ensor, etc, and the sensory and psychological realms of artists such as Henry Darger, Scottie Wilson, Louise Bourgeois and Silvia Bachli. Also historical and contemporary platforms such as Lubok, graphic satire, political pamphleteering and popular cartoon.
The research, studio practice and related lectures all re-assess the mechanics and cultural relationships between text and image, and the relationship between artist and audience. It also celebrates the democracy of production, of the immediacy of the image, and the power of the picture.
The research also endeavors to empower new generations of artists working in today’s contemporary context who having access to the plethora of images via the internet, television, magazines and advertising are enabled to see-through, decipher and re-deploy.
Presented in Folkstone Beinnale, Folkstone; Transition Gallery, London; Camberwell Gallery, London; Centre for Recent Drawing, London.