Daan van Golden: Galerie Micheline Szwajcer

It has been ten years since Daan van of gold exhibited work in a gallery in Antwerp. That exhibition--also at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer--included four paintings entitled Heerenlux, the name of the brand of paint used by the agency of the artist. The four paintings, each 47 X 37 3/8" all showed the same detail of a decorative pattern of leaves and fruit set on a piece of fabric.

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Last fall van of gold returned with six more paintings entitled Heerenlux; they direct to the same motif and are painted in the same way, with the same paint, in the same color r However, they are real different works. This time, they tender three different patterns, though still taken from the same fabric. In the first scope three 78 X 53 1/8" paintings each repeat a section of the pattern in close-up In the next to the first room, three smaller paintings of various sizes present even closer views of the same motifs.

With each of these sum of two units successive zooms in, the density of the motif is reduc The repetitive aspect of the pattern, which the first series ten years ago made apparent, gives way to an interlacing that is more abstract--the flowers and fruit disappear--but at the same time remains figurative, insofar as it call ups sensual and fanciful forms. At the entrance to the gallery, the artist had placed sum of two units small photos that reminded the visitor of his previous exhibition. on the contrary the show was accompanied by means of a 1991 text by the artist called "Art Is Not a Contest" thus it's not, apparently, that this present to view was meant to represent any kind of progres beyond the earlier single In the early '60s, this Dutch master traded gestural abstraction for the painstaking and exact reworking of set motifs, first on wrapping paper from Japanese department stores like Mitsukoshi, then everywhere his life as a traveler took him: Van of gold refused to participate in the race for novelty. He chose to track down the exceptional in the banal, beauty in the insignificant, the marvelous in the fabric of everyday life. With a concentration and patience that imposed an extremely deliberate rhythm of production on him--the ten years that separated the sum of two units exhibitions must seem a reasonable lapse of time to van Golden--he has striven to call attention to visual facts In art as in the world, in painting and in photography, he seek fors and finds elements that will allow him to exercise his designing art as a student of forgotten forms. He discovers strange bodies hidden in the enlarged detail of a Pollock (Study Pollock 1989) an abstract form in the silhouette of a parakeet chop out by Matisse (Blue close attention After Matisse, 2003), and smiling faces in the hearts of violets set in India (New Delhi, 1991) This exhibition, from one side its rarity and the mastery to which it bears witness, is an exceptional fact The precision with which each painting is conceived, execut and installed testifies to a practice that for forty years has unfolded an aesthetic intelligence, in total freedom, whose pertinence is just being discovered now: magical.

--Anne Pontegnie

Translated from French by the agency of Jeanine Herman.

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