The conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s gave their works specific formal appearances with which they sought to prevent those works from being read in aesthetic terms. What they were after was to privilege a reading focused on the conception of the works themselves, so as to make clear that their content did not lie in their aesthetic dimension, but somewhere else.
In the work of Daniel Coronel, a derivation of that form of anti-aesthetics turns once again into an aesthetic resource, but here this does not happen by way of the conceptual, rather through its formal counterpart. In his work Daniel makes use of an aesthetic sensibility of conceptual descent, stripped of the purpose once assigned to it. This with the aim of speaking about the world and our relationship with it from a poetic dimension.
Daniel does not, however, produce easily identifiable poetry or narratives, but rather subtle evocations that open us to exploring our own set of affections through simple gestures departing from the symbolism with which objects are charged by default of their circumstances. Within the vocabulary Daniel Coronel employs in his body of work, a branch is a branch and a leaf is a leaf, yet they are not for that reason devoid of meaning. His approach to material returns us, through experience itself, to our direct relationship with the world, and signification arises from our bond with it, in a dimension within which the world gives meaning to us and not the other way around.
In his work, Daniel Coronel reveals ideological inconsistencies, particularly those characteristic of the still living —though no longer so evident— modernist and retro-modernist paradigm, which unconsciously influences not only contemporary art but also our present way of life, privileging progress in its various manifestations over life itself. Through a system of values different from those of re-modernist ideology, Daniel, among other things, makes intuition more valuable than reason in his working process, makes ambiguity and contradiction comfortable, and makes the imperfect preferable to the perfect.
Through his work Daniel Coronel invites us to question our relationship with the world, its changes and the consistency of our ideology. By centering the value of his work on nostalgia, experience and process, Daniel slightly displaces the artistic value of the art objects themselves in the purest conceptual style, but with a formal and poetic inclination, perhaps reminiscent of a time when the tea ceremony privileged nature over ideology and cracks over smooth surfaces, an influence which in Daniel Coronel comes not only from those who attained Nirvana in the East, but also from those who attained it in Seattle.