“I paint engine parts and crumpled pieces of paper because I am allergic to fruits and flowers,
and especially to paintings of them”
So says Daniel Adel in an effort to explain his choice of the subject matter; engine parts, and crumpled pieces of paper that feature prominently in the brilliantly executed oil paintings he creates. And while many look at Adel’s paintings in the context of still life imagery, he contentiously argues that many of his works should be located instead in a middle zone between the traditional categories of landscape and still life. “If you look closely behind the main object in many of my paintings,” he says, “there are elements of horizons, reflections in bodies of water and clouds. The suggestion of deep space is in opposition to the proximity of the objects in the foreground.”
It is clear that Daniel Adel walks a path much different than that of the “traditional,” realist painter and that the interplay of these formal oppositions add a conceptual depth to the work that goes beyond the mere recording of visual experience.
“My works arise from the fact I’ve been involved in finding a way to repurpose Western painting to my own experience without sacrificing what’s so compelling about the great painting of the past.” In Adel’s view, the conventional subject matter of still life belongs to “other cultures and other historical epochs.” The floral still life for example arose chiefly in seventeenth century Holland as part of a Dutch obsession with the market for exotic tulips and other flowers. Although the tradition was later exported to other countries it remains rooted in that particular cultural moment. The tradition of painting bowls of fruit, baskets of bread, the so-called “breakfast paintings” arose earlier than the floral still life, more in the South than the North, but reached it’s apogee again with the Dutch in the Baroque era. Although always possessing an iconographical significance in a religious context, these functioned primarily as a celebration of the abundance of nature and of the burgeoning Dutch merchant class of the time. “America in the 21st century simply has very different obsessions than the seventeenth century Dutch did.”
Adel’s work takes two approaches to dealing with the “problem of subject” which arises from the association of traditional representational painting with these familiar but now possibly obsolete motifs. One is to find “culturally neutral” subject matter such as drapery, which, although not entirely devoid of specific associations, largely sidesteps the issue of cultural connotations by shifting the focus primarily to formal issues of light and shade, line, texture, space, translucency, opacity.
The other approach is to acknowledge the “paramount role that technology plays in 21st century America” symbolized by what Adel describes as “icons of the Industrial Age.’ “Although we are now well into the age of information, our cultural identity is clearly rooted in the Industrial Age, and always will be, as this was the period when as Henry Adams pointed out, the Dynamo for all intents and purposes replaced the Virgin as the central motif of our society. To create a uniquely American iconography requires a shift in focus from the agrarian and theological to the commercial, the secular, and the technological. There is no genuine American iconography that excludes Henry Ford.” The presentation of these objects upon pedestals and under arches is a way of establishing the “possibility of veneration in what we may think of as a desecrated realm.” For Adel, the spiritual impulse can only survive if redirected towards the real world, the world we have and can actually experience, not the world of our forefathers.
Having graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in art history, Daniel Adel’s interest in traditional figurative painting led him to further studies at the National Academy of Design. In time, Adel’s unique gift for caricature, skillful painterly ability and razor-sharp wit elevated him to being one of the most sought after artists in the world of illustration. His imagery appears monthly in internationally acclaimed magazines and books and he is one of only a few, select painters to have been awarded an exclusive contract with Vanity Fair Magazine.
Adel’s exquisite paintings are combinations of opposing notions; light vs. dark, curvilinear vs. rectilinear, organic vs. inorganic, contemporary subject matter vs. a pre-Modern painting style. By formalizing lighting and perspective in the manner of 19th century Beaux Arts architectural renderings, the scale of the subject becomes ambiguous. Adel’s choice of subject also tends toward the “visually dense” – in which spiraling plumes of fabric or highly compressed layers of paper create complex patterns of great optical intricacy.
As to whether people can “relate” to his painting, Adel says, “There is a universality to many of the objects I paint. I speak a sort of visual Esperanto in my work, which requires no specific cultural orientation in order to appreciate what I’m expressing. Everyone who views my work can understand what he or she is seeing. Even if you don’t know the difference between a carburetor and a flange-yoke assembly, when anyone looks at these paintings they see ‘machine’ in the larger sense, and that tends to resonate with anyone who lives in this machine-made world.”