Ephemeral

by Zuzana Sýkorová

In the current exhibition, Peter Daniš presents a selection of both intimate and monumental oil and acrylic paintings from the years 2022 to 2023.

Light, as the main theme and perpetual source of painterly inspiration, continues to captivate the artist since the beginning of his painting career. It appears in landscapes that have undergone internal development from more concrete representations to nocturnal urban landscapes, anonymous agglomerations that are progressively moving towards a freer, less tangible depiction. In his current light-abstract paintings, the artist further explores the capture, materialization, and the possibilities of apprehending and emanating light.

Peter Daniš is one of those artists who think and create through extensive painting cycles, which he rarely considers closed, returning to them repeatedly in new ways. This is evident in his abstract paintings, which have sporadically appeared in his work since his early painting days.

The current light abstract paintings are created based on experiences and observations of the surrounding world. Daniš addresses the painterly problem of capturing light, its softness, and elusiveness. The contrast between the rationality of image construction and the emotionality of color is blurred, resulting in a tranquil harmony. In delicate, immaterial, flowing surfaces of apparent emptiness, space emerges, constructed through layering, condensing, and overlaying dark backgrounds with light tones of subtle impressions. The emerging light, as the internal content of the painting, is “materialized” through a restrained, veiled color palette of soft yellow, gray-blue, and gray. The artist adapts his flowing painting style to this intention, applying colors in thin, gentle layers where even a more pronounced brushstroke can act as a sharp cry in silence.

Contemporary landscapes, depicted from a bird’s-eye perspective, loosely connecting to urban scenes from previous years, are more sensed than seen. They are created based on appropriated digital photographs of real landscapes, whose identity is not important. The artist captures fictional cities as clusters of vibrating glowing points of light that float in an open, almost infinite space full of light. Despite their ephemeral nature, the generous compositions do not lose their solid internal structure, moving from the real to the indefinite. Through them, the artist conveys the delicacy, airiness, lightness, and fleeting touch of the depicted moment. In line with the tone of his paintings, their sense of openness, free space, majesty, and in the case of abstractions, a certain timelessness, the artist leaves his works untitled.

The exhibition “Ephemeral” provides a glimpse into the current work of a solitary figure in contemporary painting. In his abstractions and landscapes, Peter Daniš seeks answers to questions he repeatedly poses – how to artistically depict something immaterial, how to give form to what transcends us.

“…because the things we see are temporary, but the things we cannot see are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).