Ulrich Loock 

René Daniëls at Reset

In his works on canvas created over the past twelve years, René Daniëls often returns to his paintings from the period before 1987. He adopts ciphers deriving from these works but uses them to develop a different, unprecedented language. Changing pictorial constellations express an existential situation of non-communication and isolation but are also pushed beyond these limits into a realm of extraordinary painterly possibilities.

The present publication and the exhibition at Reset mark the first time that the paintings Daniëls has produced since his devastating stroke in 1987 are presented as a substantial and autonomous body of work. Reset, a building/sculpture that the artist Gert Robijns erected single-handedly in the Haspengouw region of Limburg (Belgium), is a particularly appropriate place to exhibit Daniëls’s recent work. To create the venue, Robijns demolished his grandparents’ home and reconstructed it ten centimetres away from its original foundations. Daniëls’s recent work and Robijns’s construction meet in the way they take specific precedents into a new and meaningful present.

Gert Robijns and Ulrich Loock would like to express their deep gratitude to the many people who have helped with the exhibition and publication project in one way or another, especially Marleen Gijsen, whose commitment to René Daniëls and his work seems to know no bounds. René’s continuous support of the project has been the indispensable condition for this “return of the performance”.