Last night's gala

Daniel Clarke is an American artist, born in New York in 1971. He is a painter, sculptor and also works in multiples: lithographs and xylogravures. During his first year of university, he chose mathematics as his major. Drawing was one of his secondary subjects. Very quickly, this practice became obvious. He decided to make it his speciality and obtained a BA in painting from Yale University in 1993.   
 
Daniel Clarke exhibits throughout Europe and the United States. His work has been shown at prestigious art fairs in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany and the United States. They are included in several private and public collections, notably the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Maeght Foundation in Saint Paul de Vence.  
 
His work has been the subject of several catalogues enriched by the analyses of leading art critics including Anna Lisa Rimmando, Monteburan, Moritz Sheyer, Richerd Leydier, Anne Malherbe, Gwilherm Perthuis and Helen Carey.   
 
From his earliest exhibitions, Daniel Clarke established himself as a figurative artist. His paintings and drawings feature people from his surroundings, family and friends, which he paints from photographs. He is keen to faithfully reproduce the general impression, both in form and in atmosphere. Far from wanting to reproduce like a copy, he uses the photograph as a basis for introducing his own sensitivity.  He brings to light a form of gentle intimacy of everyday life, almost banal in its simplicity, mixed with strangeness. His characters, as if caught in a suspended time, seem turned in on themselves, in a form of reverie, of introspection. This apparent calm, this almost disturbing absence from the viewer's gaze, is highlighted by vibrant colours that catch the eye. These pastels and oil paintings touch by their assumed freshness and the strength of their compositions.  
 
For several years now, in Daniel Clarke's work, a process of detachment from the representation of a visible reality has been gradually taking place. He feels the need to listen, to attach himself to the figures, forms and ideas that manifest themselves in his mind. Little by little, his work moves from the figurative to a freer, less narrative expression. At the same time, the artist carries out a process of introspection, which leads to the emergence of images, ideas and thoughts, linked to her family history and the country of origin of her ancestors, Ireland.  Everything is intertwined, family memory, Irish history, its myths and legends, the human condition in a more general way. Nevertheless, his compositions are less the result of a starting idea than of the progressive manifestation of a subject through graphic execution. In his studio, he surrounds himself with objects that feed his creative imagination. He relies on an assiduous practice of drawing on paper, his favourite material, as a necessary step in his creative process. This work, free of any preconceived creative thought, takes the artist into the representation of a universe, for us mysterious, that we could qualify neither as figurative nor abstract. The forms cross the canvas, as if they had left an imprint on it, as if the work had left the frame. It leaves the viewer free to find a meaning, to connect with a sensation, an emotion, to recognise himself or to discover the artist himself.