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Exhibition at Reset, Sint-Truidersteenweg 137, 3840 Borgloon (Belgium), 22 April to 1 July, 2018, curated by Ulrich Loock

 

The exhibition at Reset features fifty paintings on canvas which René Daniëls has created since 2006. Very few of these paintings have ever been exhibited before.

 

Twenty years after suffering a haemorrhagic stroke in 1987 Daniëls started to paint again. The exhibition at Reset reveals these canvases to be an idiosyncratic body of work that has the potential to modify the perception and evaluation of Daniëls’s oeuvre as a whole.

 

The present exhibition sets out to demonstrate that Daniëls’s recent paintings should be considered neither as a continuation of the pre-1987 work nor as its fading echo. The especial and outstanding position of the works created since 2006 derives rather from the fact that Daniëls makes his reduced pictorial and verbal language into the fitting, effective and by no means deficient means for communicating the impairment that no-one shares with him.

 

The works prior to 1987 and those subsequent to 2006 belong to one overall oeuvre – but an oeuvre that is shot through with contradictions which drive it to the verge of being torn apart. In this way, Daniëls’s oeuvre is one which, in exemplary fashion, blurs the established separations between the competent and the deficient, the superior and the excludable, the actively shaped and the passively executed, the able and the disabled, in favour of access and ingress to what are the subject’s most deep-rooted cares and concernments.