Looking becomes a site of encounter and connection in Daniel Levi's Gold Ships

Southern Guild presents Gold Ships, a solo exhibition of oil-on-canvas paintings by South African artist Daniel Levi at their Cape Town location. On view from April 16 – May 26, 2026, the art exhibition brings together a new body of work by the contemporary artist, shaped by memory, cinema, landscape and the emotional possibilities of painting. “Levi deepens 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,” Southern Guild notes in the press release.

Levi studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, after which he spent many years working in the film industry before returning to painting. That background still lingers in the structure and atmosphere of his paintings. Many of the canvases feel cinematic: fragments of larger stories caught mid-scene. “I paint people and landscapes,” Levi notes in the press release. “When a human figure enters a landscape, something comes alive. A story begins.”

Across the works on display at Gold Ships—lakes, forests, coastlines and open water appear frequently, less like fixed locations and more like emotional or psychological spaces; places suspended somewhere between recollection and invention. “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 art gallery explains.

The title Gold Ships comes from Levi’s idea that certain images stay with us longer than others. “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,” the contemporary art gallery continues.

Colour plays a central role in the Levi’s paintings. Warm oranges and deep greens give way to the cool blues and muted shadows, creating scenes that feel grounded and dreamlike at the same time. Figures appear intermittently—riders crossing shorelines, dancers near water, solitary bodies paused within expansive landscapes—suggesting narratives without fully explaining them. Several paintings reference specific cultural images. Wishing Well draws from a scene in Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet sci-fi fantasy film, while Man and Horse (Paul and Drake’s Drum) reinterprets a photograph of Paul McCartney riding a horse. Another work, Queens of the Blue Sea, recalls a 2022 journey across the Atlantic undertaken by three women sailing a decades-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 gallery explains further. The exhibition also takes inspiration from 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,” Southern Guild notes.

Underlying the exhibition is a broader interest in attention itself—in what it means to spend time looking closely. “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,” Southern Guild explains.