Koplin Del Rio observations:

The characters in David Bailin's work inhabit an environment that is more stage set than real. Uncanny spaces - unstable, filled with erasures and pentimento where correspondences, references, signs & symbols are buried within charcoal like so many pixels.

For years the characters inhabiting David Bailin's drawings persevered no matter how absurd that perseverance was – a hapless but heroic Buster Keaton inhabiting a Kafkaesque world. The drawings focused on that figure as he (it was always he) did battle with some crisis of minutia or conundrum. But, for Bailin, this self-contained and claustrophobic world began to feel too comfortable in a time of plague and politics. The anger, frustration and fear that seemed so removed from the earlier work took over. At first, it was a single running figure, camouflaged within a pointillist landscape that eventually morphed into the crowd of frenetic men searching for, lashing out against, or threatened by something unseen or unstated that may lay hidden nearby. With the "Gatherings" series, his attention turns to the crowd. As with any fomented group, what threatens them is rarely real, but, unfortunately, it is they who will haunt our dreams.

My Statement:

As the series "Gatherings" began to emerge, a theme started to come into existence, one that focused on "phantom fears and dangers–where the chaos, disturbance, catastrophe wasn’t seen but only implied by its absence... And there on the drawings hanging in my studio was a subject and object matter that meshed with my core–a fear of crowds, of crowd mentality and amorality.