Avenue des Mémoires René Daniëls and the Art of Memory
With major exhibitions in Madrid and Eindhoven, the highly self-reflective oeuvre of René Daniëls is once again attracting attention. The Eindhoven exhibition offers an opportunity for a review of Daniëls’ late work, which he produced early in his life, due to afterward suffered a stroke.
Of the tens of thousands of works of art that I have seen, I have forgotten a lot, but not those of René Daniëls. A visit to his retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid was consequently a feast of recognition. What a joy to stand eye to eye once again with the colourful, intriguing paintings that have given so much inspiration, and what a pleasure to discover drawings that I had never seen before. In the high-ceilinged galleries of Palacio de Velázquez, the 19th-century museum annex at the Parque del Retiro, the works were shown to their best advantage ever. There couldn’t be a better setting for them than here, with star-shaped partitions set up according to a design the artist himself had made back in 1985. The installation inspired some speculations about the connection between Daniëls’ painting and the inimitable paths of memory.
René Daniëls’ work has countless references to memory. Some of the titles refer to reviving and accessing memories (De revue passeren (Passing in Revue), 1982), others to forgetting (Memoires van een vergeetal (Memoires of a Forgetful Person), 1987). The paintings in the Lentebloesem (Spring Blossom, 1987) series evoke associations with centuries-old memorization techniques. Not that memory is an explicit theme – it is sooner the case that the way our brains process information offers an analogy for Daniëls’ conceptual approach to painting. How does an image originate? What is the relationship between sign and significance? How does image relate to language? In his painterly investigations, Daniëls charted places where words change into images and images change into words. That is precisely where the parallels with mnemonics become visible.
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Read the full essay on René Daniëls by Dominic van den Boogerd in Metropolis M no. 2 – 2012.
You can buy the issue in our webshop.
In the meanwhile, have a look at the photo’s of the René Daniëls’ solo exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (until 23 September 2012):
Dominic van den Boogerd is director of De Ateliers, Amsterdam
René Daniëls: An Exhibition is Always Part of a Greater Whole
12 May – 2 September 2012
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
www.vanabbemuseum.nl
Translated from the Dutch by Mari Shields
Dominic van den Boogerd
