Daniel Bodner

Photography is the starting point for the images in Daniel Bodner’s paintings.  The seemingly unintentional quality of the compositions emphasizes the sense that what is depicted has just occurred — the way we’ve come to see random moments caught by a camera.  

The drama isn’t rendered in a “naturalist” way.  While the images appear to be snap shots of actual space, real places, when you examine them they fall apart into the formal qualities of painting.  The distant spaces of the backgrounds and the figures and objects in the foreground are in fact situated in the same layer — formally occupying the same plane while depicting different planes in the image.  It’s as if a Modernist painting is hiding in a traditional one.

We see the materiality of a technological process.  Much of the paint is applied using stencils that break up the images into layers.  The colors and surface textures reference decayed or over exposed photographs, played out at almost a chemical level.  The technique not only produces this degraded effect, but also enacts it.

While not literally paintings of photographs, it’s as if they are: Painting as a technological mediation of an actual moment in time.  The viewer is pushed into the gap between the experience of a particular moment and the re-experience that art provides; into the space between.

Opening:

Friday, 26.04.2013, 6 - 9 pm

Exhibition:

26.04. - 01.06.2013

Linienstraße 148, 10115 Berlin

Tue - Sat 12:00 - 18:00 and by arrangement