David Breen on first solo exhibition Reverie In Red

It’s a hazy Friday night, and the door rings behind you as you enter a Blockbuster, browsing the shelves for your weekend’s viewings. Each DVD is pulled from a rack, scanning the covers for visual clues – a cowboy hat, a dusty road. Films you haven’t seen before, but you recognise – you might be able to hear a soundtrack just from seeing the image of a neon sign, or a figure in black and white. 

This is the feeling David Breen is describing to me, as we sit in Finnieston discussing Reverie in Red. Opening at The Alchemy Experiment on 9 April, the exhibition explores the idea of collective nostalgia through Breen’s oil paintings, installations and a self-published book.

“It should feel sort of familiar,” he explains. “There's a comfort – or, not always a comfort, but like you’ve seen it before.

“I'm not taking things from a specific movie or song,” Breen tells me. “I’ve taken influence and reference from music, movies – lots of 90s, early 2000s pop culture that's influenced my work, but almost without realising it, because it's just so ingrained.”

“It's just that it evokes a feeling when you see it. It feels comforting to me, that I've experienced this before. We don't really know where it's from, so that's where the reverie, the dream-like, comes in.”

This sense of shared recognition lies at the heart of the show, an idea that Breen has been developing across his creative practice. Up until now, he has created work mainly under the moniker of PizzaBoy, and has become a well-known figure in Glasgow’s mural painting and design scene. The use of his full name for this exhibition signals an evolution, showcasing a more personal body of work.

David Breen, Only Love Cuts Like This. Photo: Rich Watson.

“Doing PizzaBoy stuff, I would have leaned into something that's cool at the time,” he shares, noting that “to do what I want to do at this level, the personality has to come through.

“I was always into printmaking, doing posters and wheat pasting,” Breen reflects. His work riffs on recognisable icons of design, commandeering the Domino’s Pizza box as a logo, and often working with clean typography, collaged in a pop-art style alongside recognisable symbols – a pair of dice, or a vintage bottle cap.

As well as design references throughout his work, Reverie in Red will also see the launch of an artist’s book, showcasing the paintings alongside the set installations, photographed evocatively to create atmospheric dioramas. The book has been designed and published by Breen, building on his record of using graphic design as a medium to explore his practice. Since 2019, he has self-published ten issues of PizzaBoy magazine, covering the wide-ranging reaches of street culture, starting in street art and expanding into music labels, skateboarding brands, fixed-gear bikes and even men’s mental health. 

The magazines also led to creative collaboration with friends, working together on photography, layouts and copy. “We never really made any [money] from it – it was just for fun,” he explains, “but that also really taught me how to work on design, and learn how to put together something that's self-directed.”

That crossover between disciplines feeds into a broader question evoked by Breen’s practice, regarding the intersection of art and design. How do design references like logos, labels and posters fit into the fine art category? Does art need to be purely personal? Breen certainly bucks that trend, as much of his commercial work has a recognisable signature. Perhaps there is just a latent snobbery, even in a graphic designer like myself, that in order to be an artist you need to be untouched by the poison of selling your creative skills (kidding don’t cancel me, I love designing The Skinny !!).

Behind – or alongside – his work in oil painting, a medium often reserved for fine art, Breen works as a commercial artist, painting murals for brands as a form of advertising. “I've always kept that quite separate,” he says.

David Breen, Hard Luck. Photo: Rich Watson.

We discuss whether that makes anyone less of an artist, to work within design instead of working in a coffee shop and ‘suffering for their art’. Breen has tried both, but with commercial mural painting, he notes: “I could work hard for like, a week and a half on a job. It could pay really well, and I could have the rest of the month painting.” 

Are there rules about being an artist – not always in output, but in back-story? “In street-art, there are unwritten rules,” counters Breen, while graphic design often feels like it has the full rule book, printed in permanent ink.

Whatever the rules, they don’t stop Breen from creating the work that feels right to him. “I've not been to art school, I've not gotten training,” he explains. “I'm just trying things, and there's a lot of things that haven't worked out, or don't look right, or I need to spend hours practicing this to get it to where I want it to be. But there's something cool about that, because then it's very much just your own work.

“I feel like I'm really baring my soul with this show, but in a nice way, a good way.”

Regardless of how you choose to categorise Breen, the work in this exhibition evokes a hazy nostalgia. It might recall childhood, parenthood, or even a moment you’ve never quite lived. It’s worth a trip to Byres Road this month to feel it for yourself.

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Reverie In Red, The Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow, 9 Apr-22 Apr
The Alchemy Experiment, 157 Byres Rd, Glasgow G12 8TS, alchemyexperiment.com
pizzaboystudios.com