Daniel Senise Paulo Reis
“Although abstract art might have renounced to representation, one can never stress too much that it follows
the informal and free compositions seen in the nature paintings made by the great artists of the late 19th
century.” Meyer Schapiro
The redefinition of contemporary paintings space operated by Daniel Senise in his work
throughout the years makes us reflect about the real meaning of being an artist in postmodernity. Looking at his works, and comparing them with others by artists of his
generation, a question arises: does contemporary art live only of boutades, allegories or
scornful smiles about the conditions of the works presentations? Daniel Senise, even
being the mature artist, the master of a unique esthetical autonomy, allows himself to
experiment and to elaborate visual games, so that only someone with a minimum of
knowledge about the history of art can understand his references. While some artists
prefer the periphery of quotation, thus sketching only an illusory game Senise dives into
his research, extracting more than a visual game, an epiphany.
The essential inner characteristic to the esthetical act in Daniel Senise is to be able
to share his reading, his matrixes with people. Meaning that, through his shared
vocabulary of pre-existing images and ideas, as everything that is or is not on the canvas
is somewhere in the art, is the link between the artists point of view and the publics point
of view. It is a double-hand of associations and needs. What Paulo Herkenhoff draws
attention to as symbols of an excess of knowledge in the history of art, “resolved in a postmetaphysical memory, as the empty bottom, before the symbol, lies like the desert of
abstraction of the history of arts”. For the critic, Daniel Senises iconology, which might
spring up from a fragment of a painting, is the vestige of history of art, “a readymade
symbol”.
If in the past Daniel Senise was able to appropriate fragments of images by Rafael, Fra
Angelico, Hobbema, Goya, Wistler or Caspar David Friedrich to build a representation
beyond the simple reference, bestowing autonomy to his creation, even today his
attribute is special. Endowed with a strong imagination and technical dexterity, the artist
often conceives a painting full of references impossible to recognise if one does not know
them beforehand. Senises imagetic is not symbolist, not even made of icons but, before
anything else, indicational.
The logical principle of art for the artist is basically the problem of the cognisable image.
I.e., it reunites and co-ordinates within a framework the different categories of signs that
art pretends to demonstrate. They are images in the theoretical meaning of the word, also
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Daniel Senise
Paulo Reis
icons and analogies but above all plastic, as its forms, colours and spatial organisation
are their own. With his art Daniel helps us to search, in an interaction of the visual sense
with minds bottom, to decipher at the conscious level what is being seen in a systematic
but also pleasant way.
His art is modelled in the effect of apparition, as the image is recognisable, and
disappearance, where the image blends with other images, creating a differentiated
effect from its genesis. If post-modern art is modelled in quotation often the price paid by
artists for their visual experiments has been very high. Given post-modernity’s current
trend to refer to and to understand a work’s verbal deepness, art in the 80’s has paid for
making classics banal, as Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia did. Thus the question:
if others did it better why redo them this way? Just for quoting purposes? Why should
then this work exist? The reference’s problem is far from being a new one, it goes back
to the very roots of Western art tradition, as Michelangelo, Rafael, Vermeer and so many
others made references to painters they admired; nevertheless their works are admired on
their own.
The artist proposes in his paintings more than a mere case-study in painting. For
artist ant theorist Marco Veloso, Daniel Senise’s art is the proposition of art as art, of
art as a context for the comment of art’s possible contexts. The critic Ivo Mesquita will
underline the same thing as primordial in his work, where paintings established from
the beginning a direct connection to the history of art, with the universe of images and
their modes of construction and perception. For Mesquita, Daniel Senise’s work retains
the lessons of history, but criticising still traditions idealistic dimension. “His legacy is
made of time-worn images, plastered and oxidised, surfaces to which every operation and
discourse’s order has been infringed. As in a burned-down landscape. What you see are
vestiges of things”.
As in this series of interiors, where the artist goes and reinstates his painting plucked
from the ground, going back to his first works. The artist glued in his New York atelier’s
floor, in the floors of the Parque Lage’s School of Visual Arts, in Rio de Janeiro, and in the
floor of an American museum, pieces of cloth that were later on plucked. These pieces of
cloth, loaded with pigments, dust, dirt and steps were cut in “slices” which still allowed
to perceive a darkened flesh coloration, brownish, assumed throughout the time of their
exposition to the ground, their involuntary hibernation.
Afterwards those slices were glued to other canvasses, this time assuming an
architectural space’s shape wished by the artist. These spaces were “created”, taken from
pre-existing spaces, like the Die Art Center, the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art,
the Lange’s House, in Krefeld (the city where Beyus was born), the Parque Lage’s Stables
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Daniel Senise
Paulo Reis
or an access corridor to his atelier. Other spaces were taken from paintings by Velásquez
and Rafael. In both procedures these spaces are real, as a painting reproduces the interior
of an existing space portrayed by the artist. However, the architectural spaces created
for museums are destined to exhibit art. The spaces inside art are spaces of a painting to
be located in the exhibition spaces. It is in this motum continuum that the indicational
game is developed.
The procedure of “painting” over a surface to be then glued to others reminds us of
the painters in Antiquity. Before Renaissance they made their paintings over cloth
which then they glued to the walls to create frescoes. They are, then, pictorial spaces
of representation before being historical, which for Daniel contains the history of the
history of painting. This game might seem dangerous and unstable for some artists, but
with Daniel Senise the result is marvellous. The artist makes us enter in another virtual
space of representation. The whole series of interiors he has been developing, be it the
representation of a space of the museum, the atelier or of a work by Saenredam, is a proof
that Daniel has not departed from his territory of the theatre of painting. The theatre of
mutilated sensations, of sombre monuments, set in an atmosphere of catastrophe and
nocturnal terror, offering itself as a rethorical and scenographic apparel, as adverted by
the critic Wilson Coutinho at Senise’s beginnings as a painter.
That series of interiors is like a comeback to the beginning of the 80’s. In a Nietzchenean
way Daniel lives by going back to his obsessions: painting and history of art. A risk for
artists who lack themes or afraid of departing from the cherished as a discovery. One
should remember, however, that Daniel Senise, trained as an engineer, was always close
to constructions, interiors, columns and frontages, and that those elements appeared
scattered in his directing. His painting was always interested by the expression of the
closed space, and made of the theme an allegory of culture, a human construction in
opposition to the painting of nature, a mimesis of divine creation.
As an artist conscious of the nature of art and of his role as a creator, Daniel Senise
incurs in the risks of an adventure, controlled by the experience of the daily exercise,
of the effect of painting in modern times. That makes clear to us that the quality of his
work is not due to the security of a priori defined routes. As a troubled artist he creates
alternatives for his painting extracted from his own territory. A phenomenon that turns
his painting into a permanent large figuration, full of references to art and history,
coupling a high standard of artistic dexterity with a refined plastic result. With his art
Daniel Senise helps us to cross the in-common sea of thematic specialisation found in the
artists of his generation. And that is in itself a remarkable feature of his painting.
Translation: José Paulo Moura
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