Healey’s tape paintings and Letraset drawings manifest in a physical gesture. Using found materials such as 3M Scotch Tape, consumer catalogues, recycled canvases and stretcher bars, Healey’s works straddle the line between collage and painting. Ink effaced from the pages of ephemeral magazine palettes is built, layer upon archaeological layer, like pigment suspended in glue binder and glazed into the gessoed surface. Revealed within each layer are fragments of home furnishings, household products, and swishes of color that re-assemble as entirely new images. While the completed canvases share a palette with the products represented within the confines of the mass-produced catalogues, the images of those products, even when adopted whole cloth, are robbed of their original purposes as advertisements, now reconstituted as forms holding space between tesselating colors. Tape as varnish or glaze adds a final gloss.  

Likewise, Healey’s Letraset drawings employ similar bodily gestures and use of a scribe. Again, the process of lifting material from one surface and placing it within a secondary context— Letraset typography transfers to found vintage papers—extends the conceptual gambit, transforming from ready-made appropriation to experimental drawing. 

Through a series of transactions and symbolic exchanges, these reconstituted artworks return to  the role of objects, simply products to be consumed in a process that questions notions of  authenticity and originality. Daniel Healey creates objects whose revelations and dispersals  implicate the spectator, simultaneously operating in multiple registers, while maintaining the  singularity of the artists themselves via various modes of circulation.  

Healey risks failure in creative experimentation. The elements of Letraset drawings have  potential to rupture during the transfer process. Similarly, every attempt to transfer ink from catalogue to canvas is unlike the previous, and without guarantee of success. There exists in Healeys work a surrender to fate, yet through his introduction of chance, shimmering mosaics and frenetic geometry emerge from an otherwise banal crucible of typography sheets, product catalogues, and scotch tape.