COMMENTS

The Space Between People

‘You are born alone, you die alone, the value of the space in between is trust and love’
Louise Bourgeois

‘The great challenge is loneliness’ states the artist. Like art, loneliness often feels like being trapped behind glass; that’s the signature experience of urban life. Daniela’s art, arising out of loneliness, driven by a desire to communicate, describing what it looks like and feels like, on one hand with extreme stillness, on the other hand in a vertigo of colours, can be seen for the first time in Berlin.

With colour and vibrancy Daniela Boo communicates the poetry, musicality, solitude and diversity of our urban landscape.

Daniela’s paintings serve as a consistent, serial investigation into the rhythm, mood and spatial movement of her urban environment. In this presentation of selected works from 2008-2017, pedestrians, cars, buses, trains, billboards, advertising, television and other familiar elements of our urban environment encircle and abut one another, at times overlapping, at times blurring into an accelerated moving energy of abstract colour, allowing us the viewer to think, along with Daniela, through colour.

As everything around us accelerates faster and faster our own pedestrian speed remains the same. This human pace, our solitary stillness, among the cacophony of city noise and colour, as we wait for trains, buses, sit in taxis, is captured in works such as Pasajero, the focus being concentrated on the individual. The observed or the observer? Looked at or overlooked? Daniela’s paintings provoke such questions. Spaces are created between the viewer and the observed, the painter and the audience.

Art Gallery Z, Berlin, February 2017

Thoughts on Daniela Boo

Luis Felipe Noé

Eye travels, it always travels. It is not static. Acknowledging objets may stop us, but they will be in our way. We are immersed in a time when everything goes on. Our speed no longer matters but the dynamics between velocities. Our speed, pedestrian speed, is almost static in connection, for instance, with the velocity of the subway. We wait for the subway in a spot which does not move until we step into it, a spot which moves. Immobility and mobility, this is the key to understand Daniela Boo´s fascinating work. What is moved inside the subway? The crowd? Yes indeed, but also the conscience of reality. It is not immobile.

Journalism taught us an aspect of photography: mobility is eternized (if its documentation is useful). But there is another photography: the photography proposed by subjective notions, either immovable or movable. Many photographers accept the challenge and they reach abstraction. Here, photography competes with painting. But in turn, painting competes with photography, since many artists who are fascinates with photography try hyperrealism. Today, the conscience of reality and the conscience world in motion go beyond technology: it resides in the human being.

And here we start to talk about Daniela Boo. She has her visual language – painting – set by lines and colors which articulate in a virtual space. But since technology teaches us to develop our conscience, it shows us the breaking point between immovable and movable reality, either in subway or on the street in front of cars.

In her painting, which as an object itself is immovable, paradoxically, everything is movable. But also she may stop and observe the immobility. Her painting is a thought about the thought, about is reflected and is present without being present. Thus, with absolute coherence Daniela moves between such which impress us as abstract and such which is presented to us with the veracity of a photograph. And she can afford that because she is a great artist. But, the most important thing is the sensorial poetics proposed by her which no photographic camera, not even the fastest one, could achieve. There is no such a thing as an objective look, and even photography may be subjective, but in her hands Daniela has no photographic camera but a brush and her memory, because in front of her eyes there is only the painting she is working on which, later on, will be thankfully appreciated by us.

Daniela Boo

María Teresa Constantin

Briefly, everyday images place one on the top of the other. Pedestrians, cars, buses, trains, billboards, moving advertising, television, plasma or led TV, to which the accumulation os printed images, is added. A non-stop succession which is imposed to the eye. How to make a cut? How to stop the frenzied rhythm on the city? In Daniela Boo, such instant of detention seems to happen when, superposing the visual machine-gunning of contemporary cities, she sets her eyes on man and woman, she sets them aside of the frenzy and focuses on them. With the painting.

“The great challenge is loneliness”, states the artist. The loneliness of a city residents and her own loneliness in front of the elements of paintings. And such is the underlying look of the group of works showed in this exhibition, a series of works performed between 2005 and 2009.

Thus, in works such as Pasajeras, Pasajero, In&Out (2005), the focus is on the isolation of people who walk in urban concentrations: a bus window behind, the cut image of a human, the interior of a wagon with a solitary male figure, or the passenger stepping in and out of a train. However, if in the first work the plane color of the bus and the depurated details of the different elements emphasize a certain metaphysical loneliness, in other works such aspects is reduced only to certain details and to other areas, such as the human figure, the windows at the back of the wagon or the color spots of the platform, which already show signs of edge blurring which will be almost the main theme of upcoming works. There are two variables through which the artist moves indistinctly: extreme stillness and the vertigo of color dynamics. In such sense, both Che (2007) – a cut of the urban transit flow in the in which the city is blurred in the reflex of transit cabs window – as well as Uno (2005) - depurated hyperrealism of the interior of a bus flooded with flowers-, in spite of the different treatment, refer to the same absences, to the same individual lock ups in the overcrowded universe of the modern city. A distance penetrated some times by the flowers (inevitable evocation to Georgia O´Keeffe), a feminine world which is offered almost as an open color chalice, a fantasy world, of color dreams. To go through such loneliness, to account for the human nature in the intimacy of small universes frozen by the city, seems to be the will of Daniela Boo. On the other hand, in works such as Del otro lado II (2005) – what is seen at the other side of a moving subway train – figuration threatens to disappear, and images are centered in the vitality of movement. Forms lose all definition to turn into an horizontal abstraction of colors and lights.

In 2008-2009, some of Boo´s works to surrender to the requirements of color, light and movement and to the visual problems set out. Now painting is not the representation of an object but withholding of movement (or of the color movement). In these works, the eye does not act as a photographic camera but as a moving camera which is still fixed on movable bodies. The fast passing of subway trains is thus the theme of different work, among them ¿Qué hay detrás de la luz? and Double motion (2008), which are a series. At a certain moment, these works deviate from what is real and are announced with names which evoke mythology. As when in fairy tales, damp patches on walls transform into monsters or into seductive adventure of titans. Thus, dynamic image of color loses all pretension of scientific approach and seems to fall back to the sensorial primitive nature, almost magical, of its potentiality. Eyes dissolve the image giving rise to the painting´s prominence, to go back, once again, to its worries.