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Durchsichtige Dinge (Transparent Things)
2011
Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Installation view
William Daniels is best known for his meticulous
trompe l’oeil works depicting well known art historical
paintings. He creates maquettes of the source paintings out
of simple materials such as paper, cardboard or silver foil which
then serve as models for highly detailed facsimiles in oil
paint. Recognizable, but pared down and muted in tone, the small-scale
paintings are at once a still-life and a rendering of the
original artwork, calling into question issues of representation,
documentation and authenticity. With his recent paintings,
Daniels eschews source imagery and creates dioramas out of reflective
foil which are entirely abstract. Keeping the basic form
of the model consistent, Daniels plays with the colour of the
surroundings in which it is placed to test the transformative
effects of reflected light on the object. As such, looking across
the paintings the object appears to shift between guises,
moving from evoking the calmly undulating natural form in a landscape
to the brazen and speedy flash of the carnivalesque. But
although the set up is a construction, the light that decides
the object is the natural unknown. The resulting painting marks
the impossible threshold between the construct and the organic
to become something not quite belonging to either pole.
This bouncing between the fabricated and the natural resonates
strangely in the way that the reflected light shimmering on the
foil already has the look of the brush mark that is bound
to mimic it.
Daniels’ embraces contradictions - the real and the reflected,
the modest and the monumental, the meticulous and the expressive
- and in doing he explores the interstitial space whereby
the autonomy of the painting may lie. |
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Durchsichtige Dinge (Transparent Things)
2011
Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Installation view
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Big Minis
2010
CAPC, Bordeaux
Installation view
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Big Minis
2010
CAPC, Bordeaux
Installation view
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Untitled
2010
oil on board
30.6 x 28.4 cms,
12 x 11 1/8 ins
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Untitled
2010
oil on board
36.2 x 21 cms,
14 1/4 x 8 1/4 ins
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Untitled
2010
oil on board
23.2 x 24.7 cms,
9 1/8 x 9 3/4 ins
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