Capsule is pleased to present Desert Views, Daniel Chen’s (b. 1997, Huntsville, Alabama) third solo exhibition at the gallery. The twenty-nine paintings on view are selected from a larger body of over one hundred works that the artist has been developing over the past months, marking an ongoing experiment in translating the spontaneity of drawing in a sketchbook into painting on canvas. Intimately scaled and intuitively rendered, each painting traces a passing thought, a remembered image, or an ordinary moment, creating a viewing experience akin to flipping through a personal visual diary—one composed of self-contained vignettes rather than complete narratives; tinted recollections rather than realistic depictions.
The series was sparked by a road trip through Arizona earlier this year. The journey was prompted by the memory of the artist’s father speaking with admiration of the sublime landscape during Chen’s childhood. The desert, therefore, is less a destination than an excuse to drive through vast highways, red rocks, and arid lands—to experience a journey that father and son never had the chance to take together.
Uniform in size, the canvases unfold like shifting views framed by a car window. A Formation (all works 2026) crops a larger scene against a faint blue sky. Amidst lush vegetation, two flowers appear Holding Hands. The desert at different moments is compressed into a single, dense prismatic line across the blank canvas in Line (Time).
With the monotonic action of driving through a vast landscape, sceneries begin to intertwine with memories and reveries. The artist imagines his father Driving Really Fast across the American Midwest with sentimental ballads playing from the car stereo; the landscape dissolves into fragmented compositions, sedimented layers, and tactile masses of paint. Chen recalls his mother's homemade wine (Fermentation), and the Ping Pong Table that served as the center of family life. Geometric plaster drawing models are incidentally arranged into a Keyhole that unlocks a fiery sky. An old painting first made during college is reconfigured, summoning assorted Small Remnants that he had previously drawn. Throughout the exhibition, landscapes are quietly interlaced with household objects, abstract forms, and ordinary moments that carry unexpected emotional weight.
“Immediate, direct, not fussy”–Chen paints these canvases with honesty and, once completed, releases them without lingering attachment. They are executed through fresh impulses and decisive brushwork, before they can be overthought, unnecessarily refined, or made excessively precious. Meaning and associations are not anchored at the moment of creation, but emerge later through the process of selection, paring, and sequencing. Blue and Purple Gridfunctions simultaneously as a formal exercise in space and order and, when paired with Purple Flower, as a distant field of blossoms. In Valley 1, the diptych format introduces a new emotional tension, as a valley emerges from bands of color before dissolving again into dizzying abstraction. Across the spaces, the paintings unfold in an intermittent rhythm that echoes the cadence of a road trip or the flow of a string of thoughts.
Transient sights caress our eyes. Like postcards sent from a place already left behind, or travel journals revisited only after the trip has faded into memory, these paintings suggest that what stays with us is often not the landmark itself, but the fleeting glance, the conversation, the song on the radio, and the thoughts they quietly set in motion, returning unexpectedly long afterwards.
