EUCANAÃ FERRAZ
published in the solo show at Mercedes Viegas Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, 2011
While seeing Daniel Melim’s paintings, I recall Matisse, a certain Matisse, his first paintings, in which the atmospheres exhibit intense colour and abundant stamping in bed sheets, table towels, upholstery, carpets, wallpapers, screens; and also the paintings he would paint many years after in Nice, in the 20’s, in which the flowered, striped and arabesque stamped fabric profusion serves as a background to his nude or semi-nude odalisques; and also his late 30’s oils and drawings portraiting women wearing exuberant patterns, often named simply “La robe de lamé”, “La bluse roumaine” or “Femme collier, blouse brodée”. In those works, the cloths are always indoors, though as a kind of “still life” that reaches beyond the conventions of the genre. Moreover, the painter often added to those spaces a flower vase or a fruit basket, or an open window, thus creating a sort of overlapping or eco (mise en abyme one might say). When we see those canvases, their extraordinary beauty almost keeps us from remembering that Matisse was painting that which was already painted – the fabrics (or at least he was searching for such an effect).
Daniel Melim opens once and for all the window opened by Matisse and puts his fabrics in direct contact with nature: hills and irregular volumes of stamped cloths seem to dance in the wind under a blue sky that resembles the Summer mornings’ clear sky. But such an aproach doe not confuse art and nature, instead making very clear that which is almost invisible in Matisse: the fabric as a ready made, painting before painting.
But if in the french master’s canvases the stampings and embroideries were dressing objects, atmospheres and characters, in Melim’s painting they stand on their own: cloths are just cloths – colours, flowers, stripes – here tied by nots, there overlaped, forming volumes, later bended into organically rhythmed free spirals. Therefore Melim appears to paint sculptures freed from figuration or in subtle figuration. Without beeing exactly abstract, his painting aproaches abstraction.
It his with great joy that I also see on those works the synthesis and the intensity, the light and the lightness of the poems by Eugénio de Andrade or Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, both portuguese as Daniel Melim is.
There are freedom and rhythm in his paintings. From them springs that which is here but by a sure invisible presence: the light of Alentejo, the whiteness of the lime, the whisper of the wind, the leafs and the bees.
Daniel Melim opens once and for all the window opened by Matisse and puts his fabrics in direct contact with nature: hills and irregular volumes of stamped cloths seem to dance in the wind under a blue sky that resembles the Summer mornings’ clear sky. But such an aproach doe not confuse art and nature, instead making very clear that which is almost invisible in Matisse: the fabric as a ready made, painting before painting.
But if in the french master’s canvases the stampings and embroideries were dressing objects, atmospheres and characters, in Melim’s painting they stand on their own: cloths are just cloths – colours, flowers, stripes – here tied by nots, there overlaped, forming volumes, later bended into organically rhythmed free spirals. Therefore Melim appears to paint sculptures freed from figuration or in subtle figuration. Without beeing exactly abstract, his painting aproaches abstraction.
It his with great joy that I also see on those works the synthesis and the intensity, the light and the lightness of the poems by Eugénio de Andrade or Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, both portuguese as Daniel Melim is.
There are freedom and rhythm in his paintings. From them springs that which is here but by a sure invisible presence: the light of Alentejo, the whiteness of the lime, the whisper of the wind, the leafs and the bees.