Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Recent history, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New York–based artist and filmmaker Ronan Day-Lewis. Opening with a reception on June 11 at the gallery’s Allard 25 location, the exhibition spans painting, installation, and video.
This body of work, which includes several monumental paintings, is the culmination of a multi-year project in which the artist has scavenged amateur early-two-thousands Flickr uploads and other internet archival imagery to fabricate a new collective memory bank which fuses disparate experiences into an enigmatic, invented narrative teetering on the edge of coherence and fragmentation. Developing the source references into luminous oil pastel works on linen which feel both oneiric and at times startlingly photographic, the artist proposes a singular aesthetic and poetic vernacular through which to view the void between American myth and exurban desperation. A central video work marks a collaboration with singer-songwriter Liam McCay, known under the alias Sign Crushes Motorist, who wrote and recorded an original score for the exhibition. Recent history will remain on view through July 18.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the artist provided the following statement.
Let me tell you about a dream I had about you that told me something really bad was gonna happen. The clouds were back again (big surprise) and H and T were out chopping wood or smoking a cigarette when the smell of rain told us all to go back inside. There wasn’t any blood in the sink this time, but then everything came back about the night in that motel off 9G, you know, our first attempt, with the rock from the quarry and everything, and for some reason I knew that next time there would be. (Summer smell. Tasted like blood in your nasal cavity, too far in to touch with your tongue. You woke up and you were in a meadow down by the pond, the one you’d imagine seeing a deer in sometimes when you’d get that sickness pouring up inside you and you knew something evil, I mean really evil, was there in the room with you, maybe inside you, maybe an impulse inside you, or a remembering something you had forgotten, made yourself forget, I don’t know, but it was there and it wasn’t going anywhere and the brick wall in the attic was moving, really moving, towards the bed, you weren’t imagining it). Anyway, before the sweet storm smell and the aquarium-green-sky over the bleachers and the wind ripping tie dye shirts away from sticky-skinned torsos, everything had been a kind of pagan Americana bucolic youths-in-pastoral-environment fantasy, you know the bag of tricks, me filming everything on that fucking camera like I always did, but when T and H came back inside because of the smell of rain, there was something off about H. I tried to ask him what was wrong and he just pointed out the window, didn’t say anything, just pointed and T was crying and that’s when I realized you weren’t there with us anymore, it was just me and T and H now, C and R and L and everyone else had disappeared, not just you, but I somehow knew that you were the reason things had changed. I went outside in the direction H had pointed. It was nighttime now, they had gone to bed I guess, and I walked off into the stinking darkness of the trees, following the stars like we always did. (Mourning dove coos. Connecticut 2004. That was a misty day, opaque water droplets hanging so low and thick in the tepid air that you could barely see the pond over the bend of the hill. You stood naked on a wood table and pretended to shoot arrows at me while I ran around you in a circle. A sparkler in the dark. A boy upside down on a trampoline. Teenagers in black baggy shirts standing on a bridge over a ravine). Everything was quiet as shallow breath when I was walking through the trees, a low wind. In the back of my mind it began to nag at me that it was supposed to rain and it hadn’t. I didn’t think that felt like a good sign. (Corrupt! Corrupt! Corrupt!). I reached the edge of the trees and now I was looking out at those tracks by the river. It took me a second to register that it was you face down on the tracks. I called your name, but you didn’t reply. Like that time in your room when you first showed me the cut patterns in your arms and legs, just showing, saying nothing. (When I asked you later about that you laughed and said they were from your time on the cross). When I went closer, I saw you weren’t touching the tracks, you were floating a few inches above them. There was a light coming from somewhere just out of frame. You were wearing jeans and those beat up sneakers and a long sleeve shirt and you were just hanging there, belly down, not saying anything, your face hidden by your hair. These were the clothes they would find you in, or what was left of you. I told you you needed to leave, a train was gonna come. You didn’t say anything to that either. I guess that’s when I knew you were gonna die. You didn’t leave us a note, just a stale breath on the back porch and that fucking locket you were always wearing around your neck but never let us open. After you were gone and it all went to shit, a few of us tried to get it open but it wouldn’t budge. Anyway, the stars had infected everything by then, and I guess it goes without saying that we took it all too far. The whole thing gets vaguer by the second, but I do too, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Ronan Day-Lewis (b. 1998, lives and works in New York, NY, US) studied at Yale University, New Haven, CT, US. Day-Lewis has had recent solo exhibitions at Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, CA, US; WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong, CN and D.D.D.D. Gallery, New York, NY, US. His recent group exhibitions have been with Uffner & Liu, New York, NY, US; Winter Street Gallery, Martha’s Vineyard, MA, US; Palo Gallery, New York, NY, US; Steve Turner, Los Angeles, CA, US; Sotheby’s, New York, NY, US; Fundación Maceta, Mexico City, MX and Smoke The Moon, Santa Fe, NM, US. His work as an award-winning filmmaker includes his recent feature directorial debut Anemone, which was released internationally in theaters by Focus Features in 2025-2026. Day-Lewis's visual art has been featured in publications including Artnet, Cultured Magazine, Hyperallergic, Vogue, Office Magazine, and Whitewall. Recent history is his first solo exhibition with Nino Mier Gallery in Brussels and marks his European solo debut.