Melanie Daniel
Angelika Knapper Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden
Sinai, 2007, oil on canvas
‘The blasts took place about 7:15 p.m. (1:15 p.m. ET) at two cafeterias and a supermarket. Witnesses reported seeing smoke coming from a market in the Sinai Peninsula town.’ CNN report 24 April, 2006
With a first glance towards Melanie Daniel’s painting Sinai (2007) you see smoke rising from a tree stump in a rocky desert. But with a few moments more, you see it is not smoke but an improbable tornado, sprightly spinning like a gyroscope at the seat of the tree’s centremost ring. The lone desert tree, marked and fallen, suggests that what grows back in the Sinai is all turbulence and chaos. Daniel’s pictures are not fountains of political rhetoric, but appealing, eccentric dramas somewhere between the farfetched and the supernatural. It is the context of current events, telegraphed by wire-reports – ‘20 foreigners wounded in a terrorist attack in the Sinai resort of Dahab, included three Danes, three Britons, two Italians, two Germans and one each from the United States, France, Korea, Lebanon, Israel and Australia’ - that can make them occasionally cough-up political cataclysm. Her pictures are elastic with meaning, but not submissive – a virtue of Daniel’s art – and where necessary they react to political realities, and otherwise. And they are always beautiful, sometimes madly beautiful, carried off with such bravura of technique and a soupcon of flourish that it makes it seem that the artist has captured her oddball stories in Fabergé eggs.
Daniel, a Canadian, was transplanted to Tel Aviv years ago, and so it’s not surprising to see her stories swerve between the stunning magnificence of white-packed forested landscapes and the stunning magnificence of pinkish-arid rocky landscapes. In the fluid and precise Anchor (2007), one of the Canadian scenes, an old logging truck drags along a twice-fallen tree. Once rooted in a forest, according to Daniel’s yarn, the tree was cleanly sawed down, stripped of greenery and branches, given a tripod of stumps for legs and returned to form a faux-woodland scene in the background of the painting. A vivid miasma of twice-fallen trees hovers and quivers to the right of the truck until their turn comes to be pulled from the wilderness yet again. This doubling story is told like the old word-game: ‘Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off, who’s left?’ Rooted and uprooted, cut and restored, then homeless again – Daniel’s is a nomadic story into which her paintings digress, lose the thread, only to digress into the story once more. This is their sometime comic (but always disarming) charm.
Daniel is amongst a group of artists – Dana Schutz and Kristina Jansson included – who weave their own strange character of storytelling into an idiosyncratic style. They appear to be writing the next, extremely convincing chapter to the history of painting.
Ronald Jones
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