JUBILANT DICHOTOMY
Daniel Airam’s painting is doubly fascinating. On one hand, it offers a figuration imbued with the quintessence of ancient art, particularly Flemish art from the 15th to 17th centuries.
L’hommage est appuyé et la beauté des portraits d’une incroyable modernité. D’autre part, parce qu’elle s’inscrit dans une démarche vertigineusement contemporaine, par l’entremise de scarifications, de graffitis
The homage is overt, and the beauty of the portraits exudes an incredible modernity. On the other hand, it engages in a vertiginously contemporary approach through scarifications, graffiti, and engraved words that play with our emotions and prompt us to question not only the passage of time (the artwork seems to have lived) but also humanity’s delirious propensity to leave its mark on everything it touches—from a simple tree trunk to the most renowned monuments.
“The persistence of the practice of graffiti, most often etched into the plaster of a wall or the bark of a tree, never ceases to amaze me, just as the timeless beauty of Flemish portraiture and its ocean of faces continues to enchant me,” the artist explains, adding: “With irony suggested, it is worth noting that what unites them stems from the same realm: a vast collection of anonymous lives, each secreting an equal delight in their singularity.”
, de mots gravés qui jouent à nous troubler, à nous interroger tant sur le temps qui passe (l’œuvre d’art semble avoir vécu) que sur la délirante propension de l’humain à laisser sa trace sur tout ce qui tombe sous la main, depuis un simple tronc d’arbre jusqu’aux monuments les plus réputés. Si la persistance de la pratique du graffiti incisé le plus souvent sur l’enduit d’un mur ou l’écorce d’un arbre ne cesse de m’étonner, l’immuable beauté du portrait flamand et de son océan de visages m’enchante tout autant, précise l’artiste, qui ajoute : L’ironie suggérée, il sera temps de remarquer que ce qui les unit relève bien d’un même registre, celui d’un ensemble de milliers d’existences anonymes secrétant une égale délectation pour leur propre singularité.
A curious anecdote of our time: as I write these lines, a guard at the Boris Yeltsin Art Center in Ekaterinburg, Russia, has had his fifteen minutes of fame after being accused of scribbling ‘eyes’ onto a painting by Anna Leporskaya (1900–1982), entitled The Three Figures, completed in 1934 and valued at €880,000. Here, reality meets fiction, in a way.
Through this delightful dichotomy (portrait and graffiti), rooted at the very heart of representation, Daniel Airam breathes new life into so-called classical painting, incorporating it into a resolutely temporal perspective and adding a sort of “lees” that might be conceived, in some ways, as “the angels’ share” of time—a kind of “baroque” residue made of signs and words. Daniel Airam’s painting is at once heritage and pure creation.
Upon closer examination, the words he inscribes at the heart of his paintings, like a sort of frontispiece, are Latin terms: pactum, solarius, operte, consonus, etc. These words resonate like subliminal messages meant to add an extra layer of mystery—or lightness, as one might prefer. Here, painting holds the power to both intrigue and dazzle.
The artist’s credo, “To see, to look, to observe, to admire,” aligns perfectly with this atypical figuration, to which varnish adds brilliance and hardness, giving it, as Daniel Airam himself says, that famous “sheen” Van Eyck spoke of—this sheen akin to glass, stained glass, or an epidermis designed to protect a fragile, organic world.
Miroir de l’Art #115
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