Gold Ships

Southern Guild is pleased to present Gold Ships, a solo exhibition of oil-on-canvas paintings by South African artist Daniel Levi, opening on 16 April 2026 in Cape Town. This new body of work sees Levi deepen his investigation into the charged relationship between figure and landscape; an enquiry shaped by memory, cinematic fragments, familial mythologies, and the quiet labour of looking.

Levi’s path to painting has been circuitous. After graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1995, he spent nearly two decades working in the film industry before returning to a full-time painting practice. That sustained engagement withcontinues to shape the atmosphere of his canvases, which often feel like tender frames spliced from a longer unfolding narrative; stills held in delicate suspension between recognition and obscurity, recollection and invention.

“I paint people and landscapes,” Levi shares. “When a human figure enters a landscape, something comes alive. A story begins.”

In Gold Ships, landscapes operate as psychological terrain. Lakes, dense forest, and seas manifest as both remembered and imagined geographies. Levi describes his process as emerging from an expanding “scrapbook of images” drawn from photographic archives, travel, film and art history. Resisting linearity, he approaches making as an act of intuitive wandering – through time, image, and personal history.

The exhibition’s title gestures toward this process. Images, the artist suggests, pass continuously through the mind: characters, places, fleeting impressions. A few linger with singular intensity, rising to the surface like “gold ships.” These fragments become anchors, points of orientation around which his paintings gradually assemble.

Levi’s works unfold slowly. Colour operates as both emotional register and spatial device. Burnt orange skies open above teal seas, deep greens dissolve into dusk-like blue. Within these shifting environments, the figure becomes a catalyst for narrative possibility: a rider crossing a shoreline, dancers sketched like apparitions along a riverbank, a solitary body on horseback poised at the shore of an unnamed lake.

Certain works are more pointedly tethered to their source material. Wishing Well draws from a still in Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet science fantasy film, while Man and Horse (Paul and Drake’s Drum) reimagines a photograph of Paul McCartney on horseback. Queens of the Blue Sea recalls an image documenting the 2022 voyage of three women who crossed the Atlantic in a fifty-year-old catamaran.

For Levi, painting is fundamentally an act of attention. Making is a daily negotiation between intuition and structure. The hand remains visible on the surface, echoing the painterly urgency found in the work of artists like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, whose works Levi encountered during his early years of study. The exhibition also resonates with ideas articulated in A Short Book About Painting by Andrew Marr, where painting is described as a communicative system that conveys a single essential message: the heightened sensation of being alive.

Levi’s practice embraces this quality of aliveness, not through spectacle, but through an invitation to take pause and look. In a cultural moment defined by overwhelm and distraction, his works insist on a slower form of attention. Gold Ships resists fixed narrative, gesturing instead toward an open voyage; an invitation to inhabit an inner space where looking becomes a site of both encounter and connection.