DANIL

Danil has been a close friend for a number of years. I know him well and I understand the meaning of his work. But meaning is always a personal matter and, therefore, it is difficult to speak of someone's art when bonds of friendship intervene. One is tempted to put the intent before the achievement and this is a fatal error. In the true artist's case, his attainment is greater than his purpose as well as different from it. Something more than his own voice transcends his direct speech and it becomes indirect. Time uses his talent for its own ends. His inspiration is prompted by thoughts and problems which reside wholly outside his emotively established references. This explains Danil's almost butterfly-like wavering course. Few artists of his generation can look back on a more disharmonious-seeming career. He has left almost no medium unexplored. His paintings experimented with a large number of contemporary styles; and his sculpture shows the adventurousness of a spirit unafraid of the recent, technological media. Humility is his singular triumph. He has never attempted to disguise the voice of our age in the false attire of artificial character. His responsiveness has remained essentially free. He has succeeded in making machines which painted quasi-naturalistic pictures of light; and he has also grappled with the problem of constructing paintings which indicate the mechanical discipline of our environment. Each aspect of his multiform declarations is motivated by prior contemplation. The visual statement presents, in his case, either discussion or the conclusion of an argument. Danil's compositions are not meant to be emptily beautiful. Their purpose is persuasion or debate. Nor is it irrelevant to stress this because the fine arts perform such functions only in very roundabout ways. Their means of stating a case comes from the conflict between tradition and the artist's inevitable individuality; and - this happens also to be the artist's possibility to enlarge the impact of his voice.

A preamble of this kind is useful to bring out the special nature of Danil's contribution. It serves to provide a context for a new phase in his development and indicates how Danil's oeuvre outgrows the limitation of individual expression. In the present, his problem is reality itself. He has used the traditional picture to attack a philosophical problem. The surface is his painterly vehicle but paradoxical assertions do not interest him; and he goes beyond the hypothesis of the icon's or the Moebius strip's self-sufficient, unilateral existence in space. Logically, he explores the interrelation of two surfaces. The picture's illusion is based on their harmonious and complete interaction. The paint rests on a support which cannot dispense with its hidden face, turned Towards the wall. Danil searches for consequences with the mathematician's rigour and it is his thesis that if illusion is the result of an interaction between the two surfaces of the painter's statement, then reality resides somewhere at the back of the illusion. The formulation is exciting as well as original. I do not agree with the proposition that Reality exists or that a singular reality can be defined; but, if we accept the premiss, then methodical destruction of false or mistaken notions. Danil's stance coincides, in fact, with my firm belief that the demonstrable nature of a lie is the only kind of evidence we have to speak about 'truth'. His present paintings are, thus, a didactic gesture and they serve a nearly religious cause; the truth's - which lies beyond the grasp of pictures, Thinking along these lines, he was led to redistribute the painter's signals between back and form. The illusion does not distinguish between hidden motives and open, acknowledged apperceptions. He is likely to be the first painter in whose work both surfaces carry an equal share of the pictorial burden - but, in order to obtain this ideal, he was forced to deprive the image of its metaphysical values. He communicates his meaning through contrived absences in the picture's geometry. Danil treats his compositions after the Constructivists' fashion - but, with a knife. Different chromatic values define back and front. The canvas is slashed and refolded to reproduce a regularly patterned interrelationship between two distinct entities. The process ensures gaping discontinuities - lacks of substance, which then guide the spectator's eye towards the wall. (The wall is, incidentally, Danil final symbol. It may well be that in his secret thoughts he equates its categorical silence with reality.) His patterning should be seen as the painter's attempt to reach out towards this absence-defined absolute. The schemes observe the optical realities of every illusion emphatically. The overlapping areas reproduce values derived from the admixture of his primary colours; and, at their edges, the hallucinatory hues of interaction appear after the flame's flickering fashion. Rules determine the result of every process in making these designs and their application is ruthless. Rectangles are born from their employment and they bring the Constructivists' fierce commitment to Danil's task - but Danil's London critics were right to stress that his involvement in ideas evoked the passion of abstract expressionism even from mere geometrical abstraction.

R.C. KENEDY
October 1, 1972, London.