Daniel Bastard aka "dab"
is a Paris-based visual artist and writer
His discovery of philosophy as a teenager led him to explore his primal fascination with images, be they forms, signs or language. From a peasant background, he followed a ‘serious’, legit career path: he became a journalist, learned six foreign languages and spent six years in China.
Yet deep down he felt that, as Milan Kundera put it, ‘Life is elsewhere’. In the secrecy of his student room, he experimented with all kinds of techniques to hone his style. He began with frescoes painted with gouache on paper tablecloths, then refined his approaches: drawings from the motif, live models, studies of the classical masters, explorations ‘in the manner of’...
After learning Chinese calligraphy from a master in Beijing, he took evening classes at the Beaux-Arts studios in Paris. And off he went: Daniel dipped his brushes in acrylic for abstract compositions, in oil for genre scenes, in Indian ink to sublimate ideograms, before unsheathing his scalpel for spray-painting stencils. His art is maturing, developing and becoming more distinctive.
Now a member of La Condamine artists’ collective, Daniel Bastard exhibits his work in various venues in the Paris region. His series of paintings “Second Chance” will be on show at the Dissident Club, in Paris's 9th arrondissement, from 3 to 16 June 2024.
Artistic approach and positioning
Daniel's work is an answer to an existential need, inherited from a childhood trauma: each work of art must remove misery from this world, by instilling a little poetry into the arbitrariness of reality. The production of meaning through images is, in this sense, an eminently moral affair. And his art is essentially political: every series Daniel produces is an interrogation of the power of the images that colonize us.
Personality cult, male gaze, arbitrary cartography, erasure of collective memories... In a world saturated with formatted, automated messages, Daniel's work proposes a form of decolonization and reappropriation of images. And while he is fully in tune with his time and history, Daniel is constantly reinventing art, re-enacting creation. There can be no evolution, he believes, without eternal return.
However, these conceptual and ethical preoccupations are shattered by Daniel's pictorial practice, at the confluence of Malevitchian suprematism and punk iconoclasm. He precisely chooses the medium best suited to the subject at hand: the liveliness of acrylics accentuates the assertiveness of the subject, the viscosity of oil allows a narrative to emerge, the projections of spray paint thwart the intentionality of his gesture...
In front of his work, each viewer experiences a disquieting familiarity and a reassuring strangeness. First, second, tenth degree... It's up to the viewer to find the right distance to be amused, destabilized or invigorated. More than a journey, it’s a redemption.
