THE OBJECT AND THE GLIMPSE

 

 

It is impossible to observe Daniel Solomons’ pieces and not be surprised.  His work leaves nobody indifferent, not even those that just happen to browse around the gallery by accident.   There is a background paradox:  the objective of the artist from Madrid is not to impress, this production, today, revolves around the creation of metal sculptures combined with coloured facets.  Solomons’ creativity is fed from a conglomeration of styles and its permeable trends go from minimalism to abstraction: Donald Judd, Richard Eacon, Malevitch, Fran Gehry or Anthony Caro, among others, are found within his interests.   Solomons not only uses architectural and visual references in his iconographic investigation but is also nurtured by the reading of so‐called Anglo‐Saxon mentalist poets of a symbolist tradition, whose voices stimulate his stylised variations.   There is no doubt that these pieces seem to hear the verses, merely whispered, of William Blake, Frost, Merrill, Wilbur and can even hear the teachings of George Steiner.

 

It should be pointed out that despite his sobriety, even his false simplicity, his works are of an elegance of many registers.   Although his world has yet to be discovered, his polyhedral view has given way to the birth of straight metal forms, aligned and coloured that try to synthesise the metal and its multiple possibilities, showing a concern for volume and surface establishing an intense dialogue with space and light.   In this way, the textures of the surfaces are essential and relate intimately with their environment, challenging our perception, i.e. the artist commits the admirer with the admired objects.   This peculiar process could seem excessive to the lovers of traditional sculptured art forms.

 

Daniel Solomons has never abandoned painting, the basis of his most recent production.   This doesn’t surprise us either after examining the selection of colours used and their compositional siting on the polished stainless steel of his sculptures.   Although they possess a outlying classical temperament, in the sense that this artist shapes, organises his work, introduces a distant coldness, avoids a direct expressiveness, we cannot argue that these pieces are static and unchanging, on the contrary, they mutate as we move on, and we watch them through space.

 

Ernest Hemingway once wrote that a good story must be like an iceberg: what you can see is always less than what it is in the water, providing intensity, mystery, strength and significance to what floats on the surface.  In a way, this sentence can be linked to the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño: culture is reality; and that is precisely what Daniel Solomons’ sculptures are, with their colour modulations, contrasts and translucencies, everything that encloses the representation of visible things, and that it is reinforced in this artistic work, and it becomes even more obvious.

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Jesus Reina Palazon

Art Critic and Curator