René Daniëls: Works on Paper

Modern Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of earlier works on paper by René Daniëls, his second solo presentation with the gallery. Spanning an industrious period between 1976 and 1987, the exhibition traces the development of Daniëls’ oeuvre from its punk beginnings to its increasingly pointed critique of the commercial art world in the latter half of the 1980s. Shortly after finishing art school in ’s-Hertogenbosch in the late ’70s, René Daniëls began work on a foundational series of large scale ink drawings. Their forms loosely suggestive of safety pins, film spools, vinyl records, buildings and even anatomical parts, the works cut up and energetically reassemble the world, making patterns of peripheral objects. In them, rhythms and vibrations seem to be generated by items that themselves suggest ideas of representation, reproduction and transmission. As one reviewer remarked in 1978, “Due to their continual repetition into a scheme, the subjects become an arrangement which is, at the same time, a method […] the work does not refer to, but is in itself a structure.” Imbued with the cartoonish dynamism of crosshatches and parallel lines, these images both picture Daniëls’ countercultural backdrop, and anticipate the self-reflexive devices that punctuate his later work.

 

In the ground floor gallery, a group of five works executed between 1976 and 1978 gestures to the original presentation of the series in Daniëls’ first institutional exhibition, organised by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 1979. Remixed here in the spirit of their conception, the works throw into focus the act of drawing as a formal and physical exercise, which sometimes demanded of Daniëls that he wrap the oversized sheets of paper around the walls of his home. By restoring bodily presence to the artwork, Daniëls was asserting himself as a protagonist in post-conceptual painting. In these drawings, too, are the beginnings of the artist’s longstanding interests in recognisability and the duplicity of trompe l’oeil.

In the lower ground floor space, a larger group of works dating from 1976 to 1987 incorporates imagery ranging from dreamscapes and Amsterdam canal houses to Borsalino-shaped heads and Daniëls’ iconic bow tie gallery. Certain drawings make reference to the production of art, whilst allusions to art history, and in particular the genres of portraiture and Dutch landscape painting, drive at its reception and periodisation. In-keeping with Daniëls’ winking approach, humorous elements reappear throughout.

 

Daniëls’ drawings are widely considered to be as important as his paintings, and the two media have been presented on equivalent terms in exhibitions at De Pont Museum, Tilburg (2007); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1999); and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1986). His graphic works have also been the subject of dedicated exhibitions at Art Stations Foundation, Poznań/The Drawing Room, London (2014–2015); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1983).

 

Text by Jaap Bremer, introduction to René Daniëls. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1978

 

René Daniëls bases his work on the method of repetition. Each pen or brush stroke is unique, but is placed according to a pre-selected shape, which is continuously repeated within the edges of the sheet or canvas. In his earlier drawings (1976-77), this repetition of one or more forms produced a free and lively pattern. The shapes used often appear to resemble simple objects such as a box, a safety pin, or a gramophone record. The meaning of this object is, however, of minor importance. It merely gives rise to the repetition of the same drawing or painting act. The shapes are used to build a grid or structure. Typical of these orderings is that they are non-systematic, but come about freely and emotionally.

 

Similar repetitions of formal elements take place in his paintings from these years, but then within the framework of a single item (camera, bookcase, gramophone record). They follow the formal structure specific to the chosen subject (the grooves of the plate, the horizontals and verticals of the books). The painting itself remains central, not the image. Its possibilities are rediscovered in each painting.

 

Daniëls follows a different approach for his latest paintings. He chooses a theme and repeats it in three or four successive paintings. The theme remains the same, but is realised again and again in a painterly manner and in a completely different way.  A number of formal elements return again and again, such as the cube, the beam, the overlapping ellipse, or the parallel lines. These elements form the backbone of the painting. From there the painting is made.

 

Anyone who sees a series of paintings made on one theme side-by-side will discover how René Daniëls explores the properties of painting in a very personal way, i.e. the possibilities of the colour, the paint application, the key, the handwriting and the gesture. These attempts at painting, repeated with great effort and inventiveness, result in paintings that radiate a special intensity and are a reflection on the painterly traditions.