See below for the full text of the following articles:
Harnish, Tracey. "Lavi Daniel at Rosamund Felsen Gallery", Huffington Post, July 21, 2011,
huffingtonpost.com/tracey-harnish/lavi-daniel-at-rosamund-f_b_905532.html
Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release, 2009
Aryes, Anne. Lavi Daniel: A Twenty-Four-Year Survey. Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA 2006
Chun, Alex. "Rolling with the changes in his tastes," LA Times, January 4, 2007 (reproductions)
Pagel, David. "A Tactile Journey," LA Times, December 11, 2006, p. E-3
Harvey, Doug. Lavi Daniel, LA Weekly, December 22-28, 2006, p. 68 (reproductions)
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Harnish, Tracey. "Lavi Daniel at Rosamund Felsen Gallery"
Huffington Post, July 21, 2011
huffingtonpost.com/tracey-harnish/lavi-daniel-at-rosamund-f_b_905532.html
Lavi Daniel at Rosamund Felsen Gallery
July 21st, 2011
It's a curious mix that Lavi Daniel conjures in painting and sculpture. Both are about density but in very different ways. The paintings use light to push some shapes forward while others dangle in space. Forms are a cross between organic and geometric which adds to the ambiguity of their existence as something tangible. There is the feel of light coming over the horizon, a shelf that recedes into a crevice in a cave, a rock formation that juts from a wall.
These things are only alluded to, while color is cool and vibrant, something you might come across in wanderings where the average human does not tread. The sculptures are surprising because they are mud-like masses, a shrub that has mutated thickly with unnatural color. Where the paintings shimmer and visually hint at depth, the sculptures are dense and visceral, irresistible, they beg you to touch them, feel them, roll around with them.
While the color in the paintings is very ordered, the three-dimensionality of the corpulent masses of the sculptures are messes of color mixtures. They seem to encase every color nature has provided the eye with and then go onto experiment with various mergings and contrasts. It is especially interesting viewing when you look at a sculpture that is paired with a painting in relief. The juxtaposition of the two creates high contrast yet also adds to the complexity of each.
The show runs through August 13 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery.
For more images go to www.laartdiary.com.
- Tracey Harnish
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Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release, 2009
Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to present the Los Angeles artist Lavi Daniel's debut show with the gallery. The seasoned painter will present a large new body of work developing new avenues of lyrical abstraction. Daniel brings a vigorous and infectious energy to these paintings, convincingly developing the recent abstract works from his 24-year survey at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts in 2006.
In these canvases the artist creates a vocabulary of forms that build out space in engaging variations. Every painting reveals a different spatial world that occurs through Daniel's improvisational and confident employment of forms and brushstrokes energized by luscious and complex color palettes. Each work is clearly individuated from the next by Daniel's inventive approach to composition and color, yet they sing with common phrases and harmonies. Daniel demonstrates an experienced repertoire of painting techniques and his work simmers at the edges where color meets color in a satisfying variation of applications. A tight, clean edge follows a brushy one and then a stack of strokes brings together a form gradually shifting in hue and density. The freedom of process evident in the paintings allows space to become elastic in unpredictable ways.
These vibrant canvases, with their conundrums of color, form, and spatial shifts, all find unique ways to resolve themselves before our eyes.
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Aryes, Anne. Lavi Daniel: A Twenty-Four-Year Survey.
Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA 2006
The pleasure that one feels in encountering the breadth of Lavi Daniel's work is exhilarating, not least because the language of modernist abstraction has been incompletely explored in its relatively short history. Belief that a painting can express and communicate an artist's authentic mental processes is implicit in Daniel's art, and an engagement with his visual thinking is a stimulating adventure. His career began in 1982 with a group of figurative paintings, but its arc since 1990 has explored different modes of abstraction. This exhibition of Daniel's work at the Armory Center for the Arts is a selected twenty-four-year survey that presents six distinct groups of work in several different media, with his recent paintings naturally forming its heart. Despite its disjunctive stylistic journey, his work is unified by certain formal devices and by a theme best described as metaphysical. The new paintings dramatically refine Daniel's renewal of modernist abstraction since they do not call for a metaphorical reading beyond careful contemplation of the artist's synthesis of complex formal operations.
In its most general sense, I take "modernist" art to mean a visual language in which formal elements fashion a painting's harmonious resolution. Typically, modernist spatial constructions are built upon confounding figure/ground relationships. The broad term "metaphysical" is used here to acknowledge the early modernists' faith in art as a refuge of spiritual passion and because much, if not all, of Daniel's work is concerned with expressing an elusive meta-reality. Nearer to our own time, and equally relevant to Daniel's approach, is the "timeless and tragic" subject matter favored by many artists of the New York School.[1] As an artist of less rhetorical times, however, Daniel tempers existential angst, preferring to lay out a vision of a numinous, precarious reality beyond everyday visual or tactile experience. His recent paintings of 2004 to 2006 balance gestural spontaneity with thoughtful consideration of aesthetic choices; they represent a mature artist's spontaneous deliberation and contemplative impetuosity.
Los Angeles, of course, has enjoyed a fruitful history of distinct approaches to modernist abstraction, although Abstract Expressionism was more influential in the Bay Area. The history of late-modernist painting in Los Angeles has seen both a certain purism and integrity of the picture plane—monochromes and geometric compositions—and an impurism of abundance and hybridism—biomorphic and media-derived abstractions animated by Surrealism and made topical by Pop art. Such hybridism mutates into the postmodern visual and intellectual pleasures attendant upon critiques of culturally sustained languages of abstraction. In Los Angeles in particular, these avant-garde analyses of abstract painting fall into several loose and overlapping categories, including mannerist, conceptual, and "not painting."[2] They all signal the breakdown of "abstract" and "representational" as polar opposites—abstraction, in this sense, represents (a style), and representation is always abstract (mediated). Daniel, however, clearly has been indifferent to the postmodern collapse of the abstract/representational duality and the "flat bed" picture plane that problematized both stylistic consistency and figure/ground reversals.[3] In all of his work formalist "handling" and gestural "touch" has been paramount—and this expressionist stance has set him apart from his Los Angeles contemporaries. Most especially, Daniel's recent paintings are best approached by a patient exploration of their formal elements. Such a visual adventure yields sensual, emotional and intellectual pleasure. For instance:
In a large untitled painting from 2004 (p. 9) the vertical composition is decisively divided into three horizontal zones. Spatial depth is established by sophisticated interplay between an infrastructure of sweeping lines and wider passages of loosely brushed paint. Vigorous passages of densely brushed black paint frame the creamy yellow central area, which in turn forms the background of a loose tangle of solid curving lines that ascend to the top and sweep to the lower portion of the painting. On the left side of the painting a blue streak weaves downward and dissolves in a blur of dragged paint over the yellow background, then barely curves to the right to meet imperceptibly with its green partner. On the right side, a more dominant green streak, which is paired with black, collides in the center, forming a knot around which the energy of the painting centrifugally spins. To the right of this nexus, a broad area of color pushes forward to the picture plane and abuts with a curving area of black, stabilizing the double vortex. The solid vividness of this area balances the surface excitement to the left of the central knot, and both in turn are made slightly unsteady by the strange murkiness that compresses them from above and below. One feels the physicality of these effects, the presence of the artist's nonstop, all-encompassing attack, a tornado effect achieved by means of minimal but active gesture and limited palette in which blue and green are paired in loose symmetry. The momentum and drag of the brush, with areas of overpainting and juicy smears, create a sense of impossible speed, as if one is witnessing a chaotic but precisely controlled dance.
The previous paragraph obviously is not by any stretch of the imagination as interesting as the painting itself; it does not substitute for the painting; it by no means does it justice; it points toward but is not the painting. It is just one person's attempt to describe in words the movement of her eyes as they enter the painting, pausing on one area, being swept to the next, sensing completion, enjoying flashes of visual dissonance—and letting the impression of the whole settle in her mind as an authentic experience of visual thinking, which of course can neither be represented nor necessarily completely expressed in words. It drives a close reading of a complex painting but the accumulated response is a wordless synthesis.
That said, I will offer an inevitably personal response to Daniel's several bodies of work, keeping in mind that a chronological treatment (the exhibition itself is not hung sequentially) only helps to isolate certain methods of handling his material means of expression. For instance, he is partial to fragments, cone and tent-like shapes, elusive openings, and loosely constructed chains, tangles, stripes, and spiral formations that suggest abstract "thought/emotions," such as wrapping, holding, containment, emergence, growth, encircling, and liminal or threshold spaces; often a sense of foreboding is adjusted by a measured harmony.
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A group of figurative gouache paintings on paper—the enigmatic "wrapped" bodies (p. 8) are based on the traditional practice of using photographs as a means of working out the composition of the finished paintings, including, one suspects, their spatial compression. These works are a kind of simulated storytelling that exists in a self-enclosed moment in which there is no beginning and no end but only this one continuous present—voiceless, tender, inexplicable. The force of these emblematic images leads to a "bated breath," a lingering feeling of anticipation, a baffling emotion perhaps akin to the feeling of abstraction itself. Against this will to abstraction, certain tangible details of images hold fascination: the nape of a neck, a shyly revealed area of bare skin, a moody inflection of pure paint handling, a wrap of dotted fabric that rhymes metonymically with the starry heavens—all suggesting reverie and erotic surrender. Daniel's intense contemplation and articulation of surface and texture (feathers, fur, human skin, nappy hair, the sheen of metal) are unusually luminous for the difficult gouache medium. As Daniel commented at the time, "The paintings are what you see and about what you don't."[4] The construction of space creates a stage for mystery and imagination.
The large tableaux of late 1986 to 1988 originated in two-dimensional cardboard "props" that Daniel covered in fabric or painted to simulate such materials as shrubbery, water, clouds, or abstract shapes. In an untitled painting of 1986 (p. 19), two separate "flats" parallel to the picture plane create a shallow space for a puzzling relationship between a blind-folded goat and a barely glimpsed human presence. Much of the power of the painting lies in the formal correspondence between the abstract handling of the goat's fur, the patterning of the simulated wood, and the eerie force of the actual abstract areas of brushwork. In several untitled paintings from 1987, the props not only provided the literal imagery of his paintings, they also greatly open up Daniel's spatial construction, building with parallel and intersecting planes an abstract, conceptual setting for enigmatic human drama (p. 20). An abstract composition of myriad, floating orbs shares the mystery of the entire series, while clearly pointing to the absent artist as performing conjurer (p. 12).
The last two paintings of this series are especially moving in their portrayal of quiet adoration. A large untitled work from 1988 balances a certain "hushed reverence" with utter sensuality: in a passage of almost pure painterly abstraction, a conflagration of multicolored feathers, in contrast with incandescent skin and bowed head, portends an absolute surrender, both spiritualized and eroticized (p. 21) small untitled work of the same year (p. 6), which juxtaposes a trumpet with a shyly revealed bare foot, uses minimal means to announce a moment of quiet obeisance and a clarion call to arise. Both works seem like final statements of the possibilities of narrative strangeness to express magical emotional states. And, indeed, it is possible that sustained recombination of image fragments threatened to settle into straightforward "image making," damaging to Daniel's painterly goals. Moreover, he was increasingly preoccupied with the painting process itself and its residues (more than occasionally his early work is enlivened by an elaborate surface of drips, runs, and spatters) and with the handling of abstract light and color. It was at this juncture that Daniel chose to inaugurate a "new aesthetic identity," acknowledging that he had seen "representation as a means of building an abstract image."[5]
Dating from 1989 to 1900, Daniel's breakthrough abstract paintings constitute a volte face. They are executed in oil paints on large canvases and generated by the process-oriented methods of abstract expressionism (p. 17). The colors are somber and his palette avoids high contrast, favoring instead close-hued nuances that create subtle effects of light. The painting surfaces are gestural and juicy, and the viewer is drawn into the directional thrusts and counterthrusts of Daniel's brush. Loosely painted tangles of abstract chains emerge from this painterly surface, bringing to mind cosmic building blocks, although the feeling they evoke is a more abstract one—a conceptualization of space and matter on the edge of formlessness and form, emptiness and differentiation, a radiant and mysterious space of abstract contemplation. The works from the early 1990s that followed directly upon these ambitious paintings dramatically advanced Daniel's interest in the physicality of paint itself. He experimented with a palette knife and obsessively built up thick surfaces of slathered, scraped, and reworked oil paint. Then, in 1993 to 1994, he turned to the soft, pliable medium of pastel, with its great receptivity to hands-on manipulation, producing a series of highly sensual abstractions whose central imagery depicts biomorphic forms of a psychosexual nature, suggesting a condition of precarious emergence and growth.[6]
Probably it was the physical, immediate "touch" experience of the encrusted paintings and soft works on paper that, from 1993 to 2001, led Daniel to use his fingers alone to apply oil paint to resilient wood panels. In these "finger-made" paintings, he created a smooth, dense surface, luminous in its modulations of light and dark (pp. 22-25). From a distance, the surface is marmoreal, but a close-up view reveals the touch and progress of his fingers in feathered passages of paint. One gets the impression of an immense and tremulous void from which slightly off-centered geometric volumes materialize. Again, something is born from nothing. These volumes share the muted tones of their ground (primarily close-keyed, blue-tinged grays, soft browns, and creamy yellows), but they are located in space by high contrast zones of hard-edge black that beckon inward. A shifting but omnipresent light both reveals the volumes and emanates from them. The figure/ground relationship is nuanced by precise renditions of inner and outer, concave and convex, container and contained. The objects in these paintings recall the three-dimensional "mathematical props" that had fascinated cubist and metaphysical painters, suggesting pure Platonic "ideas" yet to be fully imagined. Daniel is not only painting abstractly, he is attempting to picture abstraction. The effect is impersonal but by no means cool; as in the figurative works, he achieves that sense of bated breath that signals the presence of a mystery.
Conspicuously, since his switch to abstraction in 1989, Daniel had eschewed brilliant color, creating effects of shimmering light with a restricted palette of modulated browns and grays. Then, in a series of works on paper from 2000 to 2002, he explored the potential of the pastel medium to create light-drenched fields of brilliant atmospheric color (pp. 26-27) Loosely structured by color alone, these luminous works on paper with their glowing passages and black, elongated ovoid forms achieve uneasy spatial reversals that are visually and emotionally disconcerting—sensuous, even erotic, but hallucinatory, too, suggesting uncanny thresholds into an unknown world. Compositionally, the floating fields of color signal a move toward a more interlocking and relational structure than provided by the centralized figure/ground method of the previous "finger-made" paintings.
Daniel's desire to assimilate the colorist advances of his pastel drawings while achieving a firmer structural design led to a series of large, complexly conceived abstract oil paintings. In these works, all from 2004, the compositions are subtly divided into horizontal sections. Color, drawing, and shape are synthesized into a weave of multidirectional lines that shoot into space, curve, bend, tangle, and wrap around modulated areas of hue that shift forward and back, under and over the lines. Untitled (cover) is suddenly torqued when a bright-red diagonal shape abruptly meets a vertical black line of contrasting boldness that rapidly bends toward the top edge of the painting. This visual movement is arrested by the black line's relationship with an adjacent parallel rectangular shape in creamy pinks. These in turn play a triply ambiguous role, forming a background, floating free from its surround, and bonding volumetrically to the dramatic black line. In Untitled (p. 35), the central pink-toned section affords smooth transitions to a group of tent-like shapes that are themselves encircled by curving horizontal bands—the whole achieving a kind of topsy-turvy jumpiness. In Untitled (p. 34), the tangle of lines is more assertively conceived and dominates the background, which in itself suggests a sharp recession into depth—as in a turbulent seascape. Other areas of these three paintings reveal similar dramas of formal incident and rapport that together convey a sense of turmoil within a spacious accord.
The most recent paintings in the exhibition—all from 2006—are remarkable in their resolution of spontaneous gesture and architectonic spatial structure. In this, they are related to a vast production of ink-wash drawings on paper done the previous year, when Daniel was temporarily without a studio (pp. 33, 36-37). In the paintings, Daniel continues but considerably pares down his compositional stratagem of loosely stacked horizontal divisions enlivened by a relaxed bilateral symmetry of linear interlacing. The result is a dramatic opening up of space comparable to that achieved with his use of "props" in the early figurative work (p. 12). He also significantly brightens up his palette with secondary hues: yellow-greens, lavenders, and orange-reds. In Untitled (p. 13), an audacious use of vivid shades of brilliant blue combined with a marquee-like structure evokes a carnivalesque spirit lying dormant in the previous work. In another untitled painting, which is his largest to date, a fountain-like vision erupts from oceanic depths. The playfulness of this supple scaffolding is offset by its looming presence; the bottom third of the painting, rather than stabilizing the work, seems to threaten as an engulfing tide—a foreboding echoed by the strangely mesmerizing brown shadowy haze on the upper right of the painting. Untitled (p. 40) is a triumph of the finely tuned draftsmanship that has been crucial to the artist‘s vision. It also shows the artist as an accomplished colorist. Note especially the areas of purple, orange, green, red, and blue in the lower left of the painting—a startling abutment of colors that, rather than freezing attention, releases the eye into the luxurious sweep of the entire painting. Daniel denies the pictorial logic of landscape recession by establishing a shallow space parallel to the picture plane. But this painting is also his most fluid and most atmospheric, and the visual feel of watercolor translucency is astonishingly at odds with the densely layered and carefully reworked paint application.
In the body of paintings from 2004 and 2006, Daniel approaches the canvas both as a window onto reality and as an arena in which to act.[7] His broad and painterly gestures create a viscerally intense surface that is balanced by spatial compositions whose relaxed, almost loopy, architectonic structure is completely coherent. Although a shallow recession into depth suggests landscape and seascape references, this new work is the most clearly abstract of Daniel's paintings. They all eschew a centralized object/ground relationship in favor of a complex relational "push/pull" composition in which passages of paint that seem fragmentary nevertheless participate in an aggressive harmony of the whole. The paintings in these two series, while considerably different in emotional feel, establish free-flowing drawing in paint while creating a varied, highly textured, and visually fascinating surface of brush strokes and built-up paint layers. They are remarkable in their unification of clear structure and expressionist spontaneity.
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Daniel fervently believes that there is a place in contemporary art for rethinking the modernist language and that it should not be considered closed off to renewal by contemporary artists. His is an emotional language of subtle touch, large gestures and judicious spatial construction. Such an approach does not by any means assume some vague mystical communion or an unmediated response; that we are formed by our culture and negotiate shared codes we can take for granted. But, as viewers, participating in the creation of a "felt experience" (as Robert Motherwell had it) in front of a painting is just that—an actual experience. An emotionally evocative painting, as Lavi Daniel's exhibition makes clear, brings both excitement and respite from the over-conditioned, over-categorizing mind and opens one up to the sensual power of highly developed visual thinking.
End Notes
[1] Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, "The Realm of Art: A New Platform and other Matters" (1943), as cited in Dore Ashton, "Rothko's Frame of Mind," in Seeing Rothko, Glenn Philips and Thomas Crow, eds., Getty Research Institute, 2005, p. 20.
[2] In mannerist paintings such seemingly different genres as 1960s high art color-field painting and stylistic references to popular 1950s and 1960s mass-produced moderne design give a "look" of period style, while denying the sustaining rhetoric of Modernism. These paintings, with their "unnatural" colors, distinct shapes, and flat anti-space, are most often given the added topical fillip of recognizable derivation from computer technology. Conceptual paintings are generated by pre-established systems that are often quixotic and based upon such sources as "found" texts, musical notations, conventional codes of meaning, or random formal congruencies. They often combine multiple style appropriations; the importance of "touch" is denied in purposely awkward or inconsistent handling of paint. "Not-painting" paintings are made with a variety of materials—that is, with anything except paint.
[3] Most postmodern undertakings move to what Leo Steinberg called in the sixties the "flat bed" picture plane (or a kind of bulletin board for a reception of assorted images) in which spatial recession and figure/ground reversals are rarely relevant. See Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 85.
[4] Lavi Daniel, in Anne Ayres, Lavi Daniel: New California Artist XII (exhibition brochure), Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California, 1987, p. 5.
[5] Daniel, in Josine Ianco-Starrels, "Interview," Lavi Daniel: Recent Work (exhibition brochure), Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California, 1990, n.p.
[6] See the comments of Thomas Rhoads in "Introduction," Lavi Daniel: New Works on Paper (exhibition brochure), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California, 1994, n.p.
[7] I refer to Harold Rosenberg's famous 1952 definition of the canvas of "action painting" as "an arena on which to act, rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze, or ‘express' an object, actual or imagined." Quoted in John Russell, The Meaning of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, 1974, p. 302.
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"Rolling with the changes in his tastes," by Alex Chun for the LA Times
The career of 52-year-old Los Angeles artist Lavi Daniel has been marked by constant change, so when his work appeared in not just one but two solo shows last month, it came as no surprise that he was once again refocusing and refining his vision of modern abstraction.
A 32-piece exhibition at Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts canvasses Daniel's career and features his largest and most recent works, gestural abstract oil painting with fluid lines of color, while over at Santa Monica's Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, another exhibition homes in on his small-scale, architecturally minded monochromatic ink-wash drawings.
"For the last 20 years, I've continually visited Lavi's studio and continued seeing his work taking off in different directions and exploring the abstract language," says Anne Ayres, curator of Daniel's Armory exhibition. 'Finally in 2004, I saw work that gave me so much pleasure that I thought it was time to collaborate with him and the Armory Center on a mid-career retrospective."
For Daniel, the two exhibitions represent recognition for a career that received early notice almost 20 years ago when he was selected for inclusion in the Orange County Museum of Art's now-defunct" New California Artist" series. They are also the culmination of a long and often difficult journey that began when Daniel, at 5 years old, definitively declared he would be a painter, after combing through his grandfather's expansive art library.
After an aborted stint at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he struggled to make his way as an artist until he met his future wife, Diane, in 1975. Together, they took what little money they had and traveled to the rain forests of Borneo, where they collected 19th century textiles – a trade that supported them for the next 25 years.
Returning to Los Angeles, Daniel found success as a figurative painter, but by the time his work was showcased at Santa Monica's James Corcoran Gallery in 1988, he had already begun to shift gears.
"It was painful – the audience was onto my work, but I was off it," he recalls. "I spent three years groping because I moved away from what I had been in command of."
"What happened is that I had been moved by the work of Terry Winters [best known for his sensual abstract paintings], and I was being moved by line drawing by Pygmy women in the Ituri Forest in the Congo." (Along with Borneo textiles, Daniel and his wife also collected Pygmy drawings, 50 of which were published in the 1996 book "Mbuti Design: Paintings by the Pygmy Women of the Ituri Forest.")
A series of high-contrast abstract "finger-made" paintings ensued, but drew little notice from either the press or the galleries.
Then in 1995, his wife was diagnosed with cancer, which took her life five years later. Daniel reacted to his wife's death by exploring pastels and creating what Ayres calls "light-drenched fields of brilliant atmospheric color."
"These paintings were all about daring to dance at the edge of the void," Daniel says. "Diane's death was mind-blowing, and I needed to know that I could paint without her in my life."
After the pastels, Daniel's work took yet another turn as he was reinspired by the Pygmy drawings. "I had this enormous appetite to expose my line again," he explains. "I started from a place of wanting to expose how well I draw and bring character to a line and make it probing and honest and effective, and dramatically confident or tenderly wandering."
The result was an explosion of otherworldly biomorphic and architectural ink washes that evoke images of tree branches, piers and unfinished buildings, and more recently, their counterpoint, huge paintings with big thick tactile lines of color that sweep across the canvas like a roller coaster.
As it turns out, the ink washes were born of necessity. After moving from his longtime Mar Vista home and while waiting for construction on his new Cheviot Hills studio to be completed, he was left with his kitchen as a workspace. There, he produced five or six ink-wash drawings a day and more than 300 in total.
"All my life, before these ink-wash drawings, I always spent months on a piece," he says. "I have had to suck the floor for every inch of advancement that I have made, and these represent an unbelievable explosion of energy for me, having overcome the tragedy of six years ago, and now feeling young again and revitalized."
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"A Tactile Journey," by David Pagel of LA Times
Lavi Daniel is a meat and potatoes painter. At the Armory Center for the Arts, a mid-career overview of his works on canvas, panel and paper is true to the ethos at the heart of his art. Organized by guest curator Anne Ayres, "Parables of Space: Lavi Daniel: A Twenty-Four-Year Survey" puts substance ahead of style. The visually satisfying and emotionally rich exhibition avoids the glamour and trendiness that often accompany contemporary art and sticks, instead, to what Daniel does best: hearty paintings whose pleasures are part of their unfancy earthiness.
There's not a lot of formal innovation in Daniel's paintings. But there is also very little repetition. It's clear that the 52-year-old Los Angeles artist has staked out fruitful territory.
And the range – from figurative to abstract, with atmospheric deep space and shallow picture planes, taut geometry and loose gestures, wet-on-wet brush strokes and chalky, mortar-like accumulations of thick, gritty pigment – suggests nothing came easy. Where other painters working in this idiom regularly make such struggles into the subject of their art, Daniel is too humble to do so. Selfless generosity frees his art from autobiography, giving viewers the freedom to discover its hard-won pleasures for themselves.
The four-gallery exhibition has not been installed chronologically. But it isn't difficult to determine the rough order in which the works were painted. Its 22 paintings and suite of 10 ink washes fall into three loose groups: staged tableaux (1982-88), evocative depictions of atmospheric space (1994-2002) and expansive views often glimpsed through abstract architectural structures (2004-06).
Daniel's earliest paintings are the most fastidious. The newest are the loosest, most confident and, happily, the simplest. The exhibition takes visitors on a step-by-step journey, moving from refinement to rawness, from a highly formalized affection for theatrical mystery to a basic love of spatial ambiguity and paint's tactile sensuality.
The six paintings from the 1980s appear to have been made from photographs. Most feature the limbs or torsos of androgynous models posed as if they were mannequins, still-lifes or movie stills. All are radically cropped, as if a camera had zoomed in for a close-up. Little space is left between viewers and paintings, enhancing the intimacy – or the claustrophobia.
The smallest, a page-size gouache mounted on canvas, shows a prone figure's bare feet protruding from behind a blue curtain. In a mid-size image, a figure's arm sticks out from behind a sheet of plywood that serves as a backdrop for a blindfolded goat. And the largest, at nearly 5 by 9 feet, depicts a performer ducking and covering as the tail feathers of his or her costume rise overhead.
The charged moments Daniel paints do not seem to belong to full-blown narratives as much as single instants that welcome epiphanies. But the drama feels forced, the artifice too arch to get beyond mannerist manipulation. The best thing about these gouaches is their surfaces: They are luscious, velvety and luxuriant, bathed in sensuous light and suffused with resplendent textures that beg to be touched.
Daniel abandons figures to focus on the surfaces of the works in the next group, a series of atmospheric abstractions.
In four mid-size oils on panel from 1994-2000, angular geometric forms appear to emerge from thick fog. To give these paintings their buttery tactility, Daniel applied the paint with his fingers and palms, massaging and caressing it into desired form. Three slightly smaller pastels on paper from 2002 replace the quasi-mechanical forms with pure blackness surrounded by warm light, suggesting the presence of various voids and their spectrum-spanning auras.
The last group includes the show's largest paintings (measuring up to 12 by 8 feet) and smallest ink washes (the size of notebook pages). In these, Daniel leaves behind the smooth, carefully worked surfaces of the second group for brushwork that is either rough and vigorous or casual and offhand – so swiftly applied that its unselfconsciousness is unmistakable.
The little ink washes, done in 2005 when Daniel did not have a studio, resemble the silhouettes of buildings under construction. Their backgrounds often dissolve in blinding light, which seems to recede to infinity. They have the presence of dreamy studies.
Daniel's eight big paintings, four each from 2004 and 2006, are more grounded and gritty, muscular and meaty. They anchor the exhibition.
The dark ones recall subterranean structures – ad hoc systems of pillars, planks and buttresses. In others, fractured planes of unblended colors and knotty lines evoke freeway interchanges. And the brightest, painted in a Mediterranean palette of cool aquas, sandy golds and smoldering oranges, are also the most expansive. Their otherworldly beauty is all the more potent for being painted with Daniel's down-to-earth directness, with no fancy flourishes getting in the way of the basics.
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Lavi Daniel by Doug Harvey of LA Weekly
There's absolutely no postmodern layers of self-reflexive irony to be overcome to appreciate the work of Lavi Daniel. A midcareer survey of the local, mostly self-taught painter's painter at the Armory – guest curated by longtime fan Anne Ayres – traces his progression through several distinct, and distinctly earnest, phases over the past 24 years, ranging from the montagelike, verging-on-abstraction representational work of the mid-'80s to his recent bravura monumental oils on canvas depicting loopy, vaguely architectural structures that articulate complex illusionistic space without actually crossing the line into illusionism. En route he visits hazy, luminous geometries, hovering iridescent pastel voids and confident ink-wash grids. While each period yields up treasures – the trumpet-feet-curtain combo (all of the artist's works are untitled) of 1988; the Chinese-takeout-containers-in-the-mist from 1997 – Daniel has clearly hit his stride in the last couple of years, synthesizing the type of linear spatial abstractions familiar to the work of Terry Winters and Brice Marden into something wholly original and uniquely Angelino. An additional 27 examples of the virtuosic ink-wash drawings are also on view at Bobbie Greenfield's.