Pascal Danz, Beyond Echoes

The artist Pascal Danz, who died in 2015, is one of the outstanding contemporary Swiss painters. His work was and is widely received, as evidenced by the impressive list of exhibitions and publications before and after his death, the prizes and awards he received and the presence of his works in renowned institutional and private collections.

Pascal Danz's painting moves between the poles of figuration and abstraction and addresses questions of reality and the possibility of depicting it. The media-filtered approach to reality served Danz as a basis. Since 1996, he has collected photographs from newspapers and magazines, digital images from the Internet and personal photographs, which were the source material for his works and the stimulus for his painterly exploration. He processed some of the images digitally and subjected them to his own pictorial concept by eliminating details and thus obscuring historical documentary elements. He often chose unspectacular motifs as a basis for reflection or images that were irritating due to their dubious image quality and not necessarily intended "errors", such as overexposure or the particular choice of detail. The treatment of light and its reflections is a recurring theme throughout his oeuvre and has been a determining factor in Pascal Danz's passion for exploring painting. Light not only serves to make things visible, but also to disguise the obvious motif through too little or too much lighting. He was a master at focusing on minor details, hiding supposed main motifs and incorporating photographic features such as points of light or overexposure in a reflection on seeing and perception. This has often resulted in works that are characterized by reduction and fragmentation and have a suggestive, distanced effect. The painting appears to be distanced from itself and creates a void in which reflection takes hold. The artist is interested in these empty spaces and the subjectivity of their perception, as well as the examination of reproduction media and their relationship to painting.

Pascal Danz created groups of works over several years. He characterized people, situations, moods, objects, interiors, still lifes, cityscapes, architecture and landscapes by reducing them to the most elementary and depicting them in his paintings as a reflection of the illusion of reality. By examining the "surface" of painting, we gain access to his conceptual art and the ideas behind it: Questions of perception, reality and painting itself. In the withdrawal of the narrative and anecdotal, the reduction of colour and the simplification of forms and structures, Pascal Danz emphasizes the process of viewing works of art as the primary and complex concern of his painting.

Caroline Komor Müller 2020

Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.