ERNESTO CÁNOVAS UNVEILS NEW SERIES OF ORIGINAL PAINTINGS
Halcyon is delighted to present Director's Cut, a major new solo exhibition by Spanish-born, London-based artist Ernesto Cánovas.
The exhibition unveils a compelling body of new paintings that explore the visual language of cinema, memory, and cultural mythology through Cánovas' distinctive painterly practice.
Photo Credit: Denim Cowboy Ernesto Canovas, Halcyon Gallery
These paintings are about the story, the illusion, or the movie we play in our heads. Through masterful selection, distortion, and careful reconstruction, Cánovas creates a cinematic multiverse, bringing together a cast of characters and settings, including cowboys, gun-wielding femme fatales, vintage interiors, seascapes, neon-lit streets, and fleeting gestures.
Drawing from his own photography and found imagery encompassing 20th-century Americana together with vintage magazines, postcards, books, lantern slides, and film negatives, Cánovas constructs paintings that conceal as much as they reveal. Using close cropping, details are pushed forward, identities are hidden, and inanimate objects command our full attention. Through its ambiguity, Director’s Cut invites visitors to step into the narrative and fill in the gaps according to their own moods and desires.
Photo Credit: Ernesto Canovas, Halcyon Gallery
Cánovas’ practice is deeply informed by material experimentation. Working across wood and aluminium surfaces, he uses paint, graphite, ink and resin to create images that shift or absorb depending on the material. Sanded textures and translucent layers evoke the instability of recollection itself, while surfaces shimmer with the ghostly quality of photographic negatives. The result is a body of work that activates a full sensory experience, works that are felt as much as they are perceived.
“I collect forgotten negatives from auctions, vintage fairs, and eBay — fragments of other lives waiting to be reimagined. Each image becomes the starting point for a new story. There’s something compelling about looking into the past and reshaping it through art. These anonymous moments carry mystery, memory, and the possibility of another narrative. The stories in my work are intentionally ambiguous. I create scenes and characters that feel familiar yet unresolved, leaving space for the viewer to complete the narrative themselves.” Ernesto Canovas says
Throughout his career, Cánovas has developed a visual language rooted in the intersection of history, cinema, photography and painting. His layered compositions blur distinctions between reality and fiction, memory and imagination, encouraging viewers to question the reliability of images in an age saturated by visual media. Influenced by both historical and contemporary image-making, his works transform found sources into evocative paintings that feel at once nostalgic, contemporary and psychologically resonant.
Photo Credit, Directors Cut, Halcyon Gallery
Erenesto was in Barcelona in 1971 into a family that has a passion for art, with a father who was an amateur painter, Cánovas showed an early interest in art books and graphic novels. This led him to study design and illustration at art school in Barcelona. Moving to Edinburgh in 1997, Cánovas completed a Foundation Diploma in fine art and design at Telford College in 2006 and then enrolled for a BA (Hons) in drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, followed by an MFA in painting at London’s Slade School of Fine Art.
Cánovas has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and the USA and participated in international art fairs, including SCOPE Miami (2001), London Art Fair (2013) and Untitled Miami (2015). In 2011, Cánovas was shortlisted for the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4’s New Sensations prize and was invited to exhibit at the New Sensations show in London during Frieze Week. In 2012, Cánovas was nominated for the Open West prize in Gloucester, UK and was a prize-winner at Venice’s Premio ORA. His work has featured in a number of prestigious group exhibitions, including the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Exhibition in London, Generation 14 at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and Clouded Lands at the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos (CAB) in Spain, where one of his works was acquired by the foundation for its permanent collection.
In 2022, he returned to the Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos with his solo exhibition, Hallazgos no autroizados [Unidentified Archaeological Finds]. Director’s Cut marks Cánovas’ ninth solo exhibition at Halcyon with previous exhibitions including An American Trilogy (2014), In One Breath (2017), Fake News (2018), 20th Century Chrome (2019) and The Calm Before the Storm (2022).
📍 Director’s Cut, Ernesto Cánovas, Halcyon Gallery, 148 New Bond Street
🗓 Until 1st July 2026
🎟 The exhibition is free to attend and open daily