Every exhibition is an expedition, a visual and bodily journey we undertake when we cross the threshold of the exhibition space. We live in a world saturated with coded images that shape our thoughts and sensations; against that daily flow, art makes a pause possible, one in which to reflect on the signs we inhabit, to unfold them and ask ourselves: why do they inhabit us this way? The history of visuality is also the history of the subject who looks.
The artist offers a break from habit. The poet Juan Gelman's line «it is not to stay at home that we make a home» seems to me apt for mirroring the artist's exercise: he builds not so that the passerby will adapt to his furniture and his clothes, but so that from there the passerby may build a room of his own. Still, it is dangerous to reduce art's reflective exercises to the author's intentions and the viewer's reception; an exhibition operates within a wider weave in which ideologies, historical perspectives, specific proposals and zones of indeterminacy are all at play, making any piece a timeless materiality open to infinite exegesis.
In the work of interpretation, cuts are necessary. If we make one in the present tense over Flamma, what we can bring to the fore is not the meaning of each of Daniel Perez Coronel's pieces, which is updated according to the eye that moves, but the mode of operation that opens the play between canvas, photograph, objects and the white cube that houses them. But before speaking of the staging in the gallery, let us focus on the pieces as units.
In the case of the paintings, the singularity of each work is framed by the color on the edge, which contains the surface of the canvas. The treatment of each surface is an exercise presenting variations of the horizon, in which the straight lines forming the rectangle of the edge act as a norm that is altered when confronted with the visual proposal of fragmented horizons in each work. The paintings use abstraction and geometry to set out «zenithal architectural plans» that question the normativized way of looking.
The exercise reaches its peak in the «expanded paintings», where the canvas is annulled, leaving only the surface of paint, held by the edge displaced from the frame toward a horizontal line that ends on the floor: the surface needs no support, it is in itself matter and work. If Instagram removed its grid, what would be left?
In the photographs the exercise is similar: the frame is the wall itself, and the surface breaks figurative representation in favor of a reflection on the place forms occupy within a framing that edits reality.
If we focus on the deployment of the pieces across the white cube, the pattern of horizons invites movement.
In both the photographs and the paintings it becomes evident that the artist is not thinking only of making singular, solipsistic pieces. Although what we see in front of us are images, what lies behind, hidden but visible, is the body of the artist moving from canvas to canvas to deploy the performativity of the image itself. The result is a proposal in which the surface expands from the unit toward the white cube as canvas, where the viewer can perform a dance of their own. The images are arranged not only to be seen frontally, but to be compared, triangulated and interwoven by the body that looks not only with the eyes, but with the bodily decisions by which it traces its own route.
The table with the objects and the audio begin to hint that the exhibition is working as an action that eludes contemplation. An image can not only be read and given meaning; it can also be a score, a path, a glow, a GPS-map.