René Daniëls

Poetic and mysterious, but also astute and humorous: the body of work produced by René Daniëls (Eindhoven 1950) from 1977 to 1987 remains as intriguing as it was at that time. Now, almost ten years since the last large retrospective of his work was held, De Pont is organizing a summer presentation of his drawings, along with about twenty paintings. The majority of the roughly 120 works on paper, many of which have not been exhibited before, are being lent by the René Daniëls Foundation. This foundation is responsible for hundreds of drawings and approximately ninety paintings that were present in Daniëls’s studio when he suffered a stroke at the end of 1987.

The exhibition has been compiled by Jaap Bremer, former deputy director of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, in close collaboration with Marleen Gijsen and the René Daniëls Foundation.

Drawing was a natural part of Daniëls’s artistry from the start. Among the works being shown at De Pont are a few early drawings with enormous dimensions of at least 150 by 190 centimeters. They have been drawn with lines, bars, ovals and blocks that seem to float on the white surface of the image. In those rhythmic structures, motifs that appear in paintings from these years can also be discerned: gramophone records, books and skateboards.

To an even greater extent than with the isolated drawings, one sees the importance that Daniëls attached to this medium in the dozens of developed sketches produced by him as ideas for paintings, as variations on existing compositions and particularly as visual reflections of his musings and mental leaps. In one of his notes, he writes, ‘I always found fruitful ideas more interesting than the complete development of those ideas.’ Thus the drawings contain a wealth of ideas and motifs that are continually given new consideration, and sometimes these have found their way into the painting.

Aside from being a direct account of his ideas, the medium meant even more to René Daniëls. In his open and sketchy manner of painting, the specific visual qualities of the drawing seem to be translated into paint. ‘There will always be an end to the transparency of the paint, of the paper. Always to see a painting – ah, too bad it didn’t stay a drawing.” That lament expresses the degree to which Daniëls wanted his paintings to have a transparency derived from the drawing and watercolor. This safeguards the painting from the ‘heaviness’ of matter. Because of that sketchiness, the forms continue to take shape, transforming from one figure into another, as in the painting De revue passeren (Passing in Review; 1982). The exhibited drawings also include several caricatures, one being that of an art critic whose chin juts out: der Kritiker ist ein Mann der alles weisst aber nichts kann (The critic is a man who knows everything but can do nothing; 1979). Daniëls had little trust in such people, whom he believed were seeking only an affirmation of their own ideas on art. Both in his paintings and his drawings, we see many overt or hidden references to the workings of the art world and to the prevailing urge to appropriate the work of art and to pin it down with interpretations that leave little room for ambiguity. Playful titles say a great deal about this: La Muse Vénale (1979), De tijdgeest van de Westerse kunst op Documenta (The Spirit of the Times in Western art at Documenta; 1982), Palais des Beaux-aards (1983; beaux-arts and boosaards – malicious people – being more or less homonymous) and De geamuzeerde Muze (The amused muse; 1983).

Of even greater importance than that message, however, is the artistic mentality by which Daniëls managed to elude such categorization. Ambiguity is one of the prime characteristics of his art. His motifs defy any reduction to a single interpretation; they arise just as much from subjective associations and events in his personal life as from discussions in the public and artistic domain. In an interview with Anna Tilroe in 1983, Daniëls describes how,while eating new Dutch herring, he arrived at the idea for Hollandse nieuwe ontdekt hoe Hollandse nieuwe smaakt (New Dutch herring discovers how new Dutch herring tastes; 1982) – a painting in which the fish that devour each other are often seen as artists who despise each other. ‘I’m wild about herring. Suddenly it occurred to me: imagine that they themselves discover how tasty they are. Then they might all eat each other up, and we’d be left with nothing!’ The fact that Bruegel had also done a painting of big fish eating up little ones and that Picabia, whom he greatly admired, had written a manifesto titled Cannibale merely made the theme more appealing. And so he regarded the association with the art world as being an amusing elaboration on a chain of meanings and associations. Daniëls admired the sense of freedom and independent artistic vision found among artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke and Marcel Broodthaers. Like them, he conceived of art as a game that never allows for definitive meaning, but always leaves room for new interpretations.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication containing a number of texts on and by the artist.

René Daniëls
drawings and paintings 1977-1987