davidholden.com

In the first week of March 2020, I took a previously planned 4-day trip to New York City. Three days after I returned, the first COVID lockdowns began. Over the next couple of years, I used the photographs I had taken during my trip as my primary resource material for this series of paintings. I recontextualized the images to reflect the loss and isolation I felt during this period of time. I spent the pandemic in my high-rise condo in downtown Toronto. This series of work was created between 2020 and 2024. The title of this series is loosely inspired by the live version of the John Prine song “Jesus, The Missing Years”.

My Baseball Stadiums series is an ongoing project in which each painting commemorates my experience of attending a game at a different Major League ballpark.

This series connects me to my maternal grandfather, who played for the Emmitts in the Montreal Independent Baseball League at Haymarket Square in Griffintown during the 1920s. Growing up, I attended countless Expos games—first at Jarry Park, then Olympic Stadium, and later at Exhibition Stadium and eventually SkyDome. Over the years, I’ve continued to travel to ballparks across North America. Each visit becomes both a memory and a painting—part of an evolving tribute to baseball’s enduring presence in my life and the legacy passed down through generations.

(Attended games at Jarry Park, Olympic Stadium, Exhibition Stadium, Skydome, Fenway, Tiger Stadium, Progressive Field, Safeco Field, Camden Yards, Yankee Stadium, PNC Park, Wrigley Field, Nationals Park)

In this series, I set out to explore the symbolic loss of innocence that accompanies the transition into adolescence, as well as a tribute to my childhood friends In 1970’s Montreal. The seven paintings, depict me and my friends, our identities reimagined through the personas of former Montreal Expos baseball players and glam rock icons of the era.

For my self-portrait, rather than assuming the identity of a rock star, I turned to the visual language of the Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), drawing specifically from his print Plum Garden at Kameido (1857). A visit to Japan a few years prior to beginning this series left a lasting impression.

To shape the symbolic framework of the series, I looked to Francisco Goya’s Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga (1784–1792). In that painting, a young boy dressed in red is surrounded by pets—including a bird in a cage and several watchful cats. The caged bird is often seen as a metaphor for innocence and vulnerability, while the predatory cats suggest external threats, danger, or the inevitable loss of childhood purity.

Each of these objects was given to me as a gift. They carry with them a personal connection to the people who offered them, evoking memories and reflecting my relationships with them. Through the generosity and choices of others, these objects have quietly woven themselves into my daily rituals.

I’ve framed each object using the visual language of 1970s Montreal Expos baseball cards. The original photos, names, and team logos have been deliberately removed—identities erased. This act of subtraction mirrors a broader experience from my childhood in 1970s Montreal, where public signage was often painted over or crossed out, a reflection of the cultural and political tensions of the time.

To deepen this idea of absence and erasure, I drew inspiration from René Magritte’s painting The Unexpected Answer (1933). In it, a door—an everyday object—is transformed by the presence of a void shaped like a human silhouette.

The World Over My Shoulder

David Holden’s exquisitely wrought paintings, in this exhibition, unpack and re-examine the burden and the joy of the past—a past that is both tinctured with the artist’s own history and, simultaneously, informed by the echoes and artifacts of a culture in poignant retreat from the present.

Holden is a virtuoso reclaimer of experience, an archeologist of the soon-to-be forgotten, a collector and archivist of all that is continually passing away. In painting after painting, he brings his hallucinatory, mimetic ability to the service of the memory-made-palpable.

In work after work, varieties of nostalgia become newly inspectable because of his incorporation, within the paintings, of objects and events which can seem initially eccentric, idiosyncratic or marginalized by the impress of the personal, but which, shortly thereafter, within the image-theatre of each painting, are transformed into talismanic, epiphanic moments. This is an admittedly mysterious process, by which the personal and the local suddenly open out to become all-embracingly archetypal, and the flickering of the instance hardens into the emblematic.

A consideration, in some detail, of one of Holden’s teeming paintings, may help to illuminate some of the complexities of his project. His Osaka, for example, is replete with disparate objects that have been rescued from the abrupt juxtapositions associated with surrealism by their having coalesced into a initially puzzling but ultimately eloquent configuration—a kind of utterance made of objects. Floating against the skyline of Osaka, Japan (Holden is always very busy with architecture and, in particular, with the emotive effects of changing architectural scales) is what appears, at first, to be a salmon-hued suitcase. It turns out to be, in fact, a Sony Walkman. What is currently technologically ineffectual turns insistently into art, once our consumerist backs are turned.

The Walkman’s emptied interior is partly filled again by a bird’s nest—presumably belonging to the strangely inert goldfinch (all of Holden’s birds look disturbingly taxidermic) perched on a curious, esophagus-like speaking tube which is attached, outlandishly, to the machine. This liver-coloured, organ-like passage of rather sinister, dead-tech ineffectuality (amplified, as it were, by the empty Walkman) seems to speak to the inexplicable sadness of the immediate past (is anybody there?). The orphaned lily in Osaka functions as both a benediction and a farewell. The goldfinch, like the birds that appear in so many of the artist’s paintings, seems to function as a witness to the flux, the fluidity, of time’s passing. The bird is time’s interlocutor.

In Holden’s hands, the past is not so much prologue, as it is a perpetual coda to the present. Holden’s paintings, so replete with icons of directed observation (birds, speakers, ornaments), are, for him, like diaries—and self-portraits. And much of what is embodied in his pictures is the bittersweet stuff of the past (his and everybody’s), reworked in the present. Many of his paintings invoke family holidays—especially Christmas: note the red Christmas star in Goldfinch, the Magritte-like, hovering disco-ballroom tree ornaments in Fountain (Madonna of the Firecracker Frogs), and the bowls of cinnamon candies in Messenger (with its presiding Passenger Pigeon).

David Holden’s intricate and demanding paintings, though thoroughly laced with nostalgia, are scrupulously, impeccably kept from sentimentality. His growing up in Montreal is often present in the works—in images that float as free as reveries. His traveling is there as well (his trip to Japan in 2005 is echoed in his Momento Mori (Happy Birthday), with its glittering background of the Mori Arts Center in Tokyo, and in a shard of the Tokyo City Hall down in the corner of Messenger), but these forays into the autobiographical past and the geographically remote are kept from the abyss of the sentimental by virtue of the artist’s insistence on the concreteness, the exactness, of his depictions of his selection of objects and settings.

It is as if Holden’s journeys into his memorial unconscious were like his entering a mine or descending into the sea—and bringing back to the surface certain hard, highly-defined images and objects for examination in the light. Everything in his paintings is fully disclosed. Which is what makes them uncanny.

This series of work is set among many of my personal landmarks growing up in LaSalle and the Crawford Park area of Verdun, Quebec; the local park, arena, primary school, aqueduct, etc.

In 2004 I was in a month long residency in Arnhem, Netherlands. This bike tunnel was very close to my studio.

Inspired by Edward Hopper, these paintings are of views from my suburban Scarborough office window, where I was working at the time.

This series of paintings was inspired by the selling of my maternal grandparents house in Verdun, Quebec. They were the last remaining relatives in Quebec.

These various portraits were commissions or created for specific shows.