artnexus #21

Daniel Senise belongs to a particular group of painters from the 1980s who have revitalized and redefined certain aspects of pictorial activity. Interested in a specific kind of representation, he creates a world of images based on the great themes of art and mythology, without however sacrificing his personal imagery. His use of Western iconography is not an imitation but a renterpretation, a new vision which expresses from a personal standpoint, and nuanced by intuition, his way of seeing, feeling, and reinventing the recurrent images of the history of art.

But in addition to specific themes, his work enhances the value of painting se, as a vehicle of investigation and experimentation. Each of his pictures is a pictorial surface to be constructed, in which chance plays a special role in achieving the final result: "I prepare the canvas by covering it with pigment... Then, I let it dry on the floor, with the painted side facing downwards. In this way the floor interacts with the surface. Then I pull the canvas up from the floor and hang it on the wall. I work with fragmented images. Sometimes, I have to repeat the floor process, so that the images can be trapped between the two layers of texture created by chance." (*)

His symbolic intention leads him towards imaginary spaces in which, even though recognizable or ordinary objects provide the starting point, create a sense of confusion, longing, and illusion. The physical world is there, but it is subjected and shown as something different, separate from its original state. The work becomes a hermeneutic universe, closed in on itself, where direct communication has been replaced by metaphor.

(*) Quoted by Roberto Tejada in Daniel Senise, exhibition catalogue, MARCO, 1994.

IVONNE PINI