Boomerang
“In this book, for example, on the first ten pages, we find 3 Caminos (1995), a unique work that is part of a small collection of images referring to the history of boomerangs. Among Senise’s works done in 1995, there are three paintings named simply Bumerangue, like the image at the beginning of this essay. One could talk about them in terms of their epidermal articulation, so to speak. These are exemplary works of the artist’s maturing relationship with indexical traces, marks of processes through which the materiais of his painting went through some early stage of their making. Traces of rust in them were not only pictorially appropriated by Senise, but produced by his arranging nails on the canvas to define curvatures that were, in turn, also lines of flight of boomerangs, thus past or future trai Is of other moving bodies. ln his subject matter and his facture, therefore, the epidermis of these paintings refers to trai Is and footprints.
But Senise has been on track for many decades, so these works could also be seen as hints of his interest in the apparatus of vision. Evidence of this boomerang-vision analogy is in the aforementioned 3 Caminos, in which at the height of the silhouetted girl’s eyes, three of the outline trajectories seem to leave and return, juxtaposed as one single entanglement. The figure relates to some incipient optical study, perhaps a medieval or pre-perspectival one, and at the sarne time is a perfect metaphor for the dilemmas mentioned above in the preamble. lnstead of a linear and geometric representation of the battened down lines of light, the gaze appears represented by a tangle of curves that come and go without distinction between subject and setting. Moreover, they are visually counterbalanced by a kind of mirrored ghost line that might allude to what the girl sees but does not perceive, or even to what she does not see but nonetheless perceives.”
(excerpt from text “Daniel Senise, or I just wanted to tell you a couple of things”, by Paulo Miyada, Published in Quase Aqui: Daniel Senise, Associação para o Patronato Contemporâneo, São Paulo, Brazil, 2018)
Daniel Senise, or I just wanted to tell you a couple of things
