In a world of excess, Daniel Fleur’s paintings highlight the often arcane and arbitrary content which infiltrates our social media feeds. He meticulously compiles screenshots of decadent lifestyles seen on Instagram and TikTok, drawing our view into scenes where luxuries such as jewellery and champagne are shared. Daniel then transposes them in scrupulous layers of ochre and grey acrylic paint – a technique adopted by the Old Masters to heighten drama – before the resultant brighter layers accentuate his earlier marks. 

Hedonism has long been a source of inspiration for artists. The Decadent Movement of the late 19th century was characterised by artworks which depicted affluence and beauty, rejecting the Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose. For Daniel, many of his references turn to painters who share this mindset, notably Peder Severin Krøyer¹ and Pierre-Auguste Renoir², whose champagne-fuelled scenes portray congregations of people celebrating. Or, in Diego Velázquez’s³ painting of the young Maria Theresa of Spain and John Singer Sargent’s⁴ portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau – both are bejewelled and draped in opulent dresses, flaunting their fortunes to the onlooking viewer. 

In Daniel’s paintings the protagonists’ identities are concealed. Almost every composition is populated by hands engaging in an exchange, whether that be the passing over of jewellery or the toasting of a drink. The absence of recognisable characteristics suspends the paintings in seemingly fabricated surroundings, his luminous palette detaching them even further from reality. Daniel notes that, ‘although the motifs are modern, they resonate with scenes from historical paintings’. His interests don’t always point to the past, as he draws from contemporary painters Issy Wood⁵ and John Currin⁶, who portray inebriated subjects bearing drinks. 

By scrolling through his endless feeds and handpicking the cursory glimpses, Daniel’s process of immortalising them in paint is surprisingly slow and precise. He attends to each layer with exacting precision using the earlier built up layers to highlight the defining outlines on top. Like zoomed in narratives of a much larger painting, he decidedly makes these moments of exchange the full plot, allowing us as viewers to speculate what surrounds the glitz and glamour.