Art Review

This self-portrait is one of the Polaroids that artist Daniel Regan submerged in his ADHD medication and water to create this effect / Daniel Regan

The brush of nature does not tremble

The photography of Daniel Regan

April 30th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

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Before art, there was the image. The wind has been drawing linear patterns on the dunes for millions of years, always different and yet always recognisable. Water has polished stones into lovely pebbles, full of nuance. Polyps shape the corals themselves, raising branched, almost labyrinthine structures of extraordinary beauty out of blind secretions of calcium carbonate. Arabesques that art can imitate but never surpass. Like the veins of a mineral cut in half, the stains rust leaves on iron, the texture of a lung seen under a microscope. All of them images no human designed, and which nevertheless produce in whoever looks at them something close to recognition. Like remembering something we never saw. So that what we call abstract in art has been practised by nature forever, and effortlessly.

Perhaps that is why certain works of art speak to us in ways we cannot explain. Because they let themselves be heard at a similar frequency, because the artist, knowingly or not, has found a way to let forces beyond his will take part — chance, chemistry, time.

Which is what Daniel Regan has done. He takes a photograph — a usually definitive gesture — and surrenders it to chance, to the whim of time. He submerges it in water mixed with his ADHD medication, lisdexamfetamine, and waits to see what happens. Up to three months. What emerges has nothing to do with what he photographed, but with what the solution did to the emulsion during that time. An agreement, beyond his will, between his gaze and the chemistry that is trying to reorganise his own brain.

The parallel tells itself, and Regan knows it. The same compound that raises his dopamine levels, that sharpens his attention, that transforms his experience of the world, is the one that dissolves, tints and remakes his images. The drug is co-author of the piece, and not only as its subject. And there is one more, behind every work — time.

Regan’s technique transforms a Polaroid photo of the Australian bush / Daniel Regan

Daniel works with Polaroid. This is no minor detail. The Polaroid is analogue, unpredictable, irreversible. There is no RAW file to process, no possible correction. What comes out is everything it can be. In that sense it is an honest medium for speaking about his condition. His mind is not easily edited, nor does it erase, it records everything at the same intensity, it does not rank the urgent and the incidental.

The works that emerge from this process have that strange flavour of 'nature'. In the best-known self-portrait of the series, the body appears wrapped in what looks like a silk shroud. The altered layers of emulsion create a texture that is at once protection and fragility. The artist himself describes it as the sensation of being held by something very delicate. It oscillates between relief and surrender, between embrace and entombment. It has been insisted that the work does not celebrate the medication. I will not say that it does, or that it doesn't. It is something more complex and more truthful.

Another image in the series captures vegetation from the Australian bush, but the process has turned it into something else. An explosion of chaotic patterns, of overlapping signals, of everything happening at once and at the same intensity. Regan says this represents how untreated ADHD feels. Every channel open, no signal more important than another. A mind that receives the entire world at once, unfiltered.

Originally a self-portrait, this image became something very different after Regan submerged it / Daniel Regan

Then there is the blue image, also a self-portrait, which the chemistry of the drug has carried into another territory. They look like cellular structures seen under a microscope — bubbles, membranes, molecular patterns. The human body dissolved into its own biology. Regan finds it logical, almost inevitable. His logic rests on his experience. If he introduces into his body a solution that reorganises his neurotransmitters, why would it not reorganise the images he constructs?

The series is titled C₁₅H₂₅N₃O. The chemical formula of lisdexamfetamine. The exact name of what he carries in his body. It is a declaration of precision that is also a gesture of detachment. To name oneself by a formula. To identify one's own transformation with a chain of atoms.

These works are exhibited at the Bethlem Gallery in London, a context that is anything but neutral. The gallery sits inside the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the oldest psychiatric hospital in Europe, whose popular name — Bedlam — became, for centuries, a synonym for chaos and madness. That this is precisely where art treating neurodivergence with such delicacy and intelligence is being shown is, in itself, an argument. The same building that stood for so long as a symbol of society's fear of the different mind now welcomes narratives that treat it with dignity and aesthetic respect.

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Traces of nature remain in this shot, even after Regan has altered it / Daniel Regan

The group exhibition in which he takes part is called (be)longing. The title plays on two English words — belonging, and longing. To be in the process of belonging. To long to belong. It is a tension that anyone who has received a late diagnosis can recognise. The feeling of having lived for years without a frame that explained one's own experience, then finding it, and not quite knowing whether this new knowledge sets one free or simply redefines one.

Nature paints with wind, with salt, with time, just as Daniel Regan paints with chemical solutions that reconfigure him from within. There is something in that coincidence — or in the decision to make the coincidence a poetics — that goes beyond art about illness or about medication.

It is about transformation, about what it means to be transformed. About yielding control to forces you did not entirely choose, and finding in the result something you would otherwise never have seen. About the strange beauty of processes that escape the hands. Regan has just found a way of being nature. Of being it, perhaps. Is this what we can understand as art? Is art the result of certain forces acting upon any given entity? Is time an artist? Can we say that Regan is nature, or, on the contrary, that he is not? When I lean over abysses like these, I never glimpse the bottom.

Greenery becomes even more striking after Regan submerges it / Daniel Regan

Daniel Regan: (be)longing
Bethlem Gallery
22 April – 11 July 2026
Open 9.30am – 5pm, Wednesday – Saturday
Bethlem Royal Hospital
Monks Orchard Road,
London, BR3 3BX
020 32 284 101
info@bethlemgallery.com...