Lavi Daniel

Lavi Daniel is a self-taught painter whose unique vision has been equally shaped by love for a certain Renaissance sense of color-blocking and balance, intimacy with the evocative potential of abstract textile design, and the organic surrealism of memory and wonder in a child’s imagination.

The entryway and two east galleries are occupied by 12 intimately scaled paintings and five tabletop sculptures by Lavi Daniel. His oils on canvas and linen are the best he has made. Solid, muscular and brushed into existence with a perfunctory, get-it-done-quickly vigor, each is also dreamy and elusive: a lovely symphony of subtly modulated organic tints quietly electrified by otherworldly light.

It's a curious mix that Lavi Daniel conjures in painting and sculpture. Both are about density but in very different ways. The paintings use light to push some shapes forward while others dangle in space. Forms are a cross between organic and geometric which adds to the ambiguity of their existence as something tangible. There is the feel of light coming over the horizon, a shelf that recedes into a crevice in a cave, a rock formation that juts from a wall.

“For the last 20 years, I’ve continually visited Lavi’s studio and continued seeing his work taking off in different directions and exploring the abstract language,” says Anne Ayres, curator of Daniel’s Armory exhibition. “Finally in 2004, I saw work that gave me so much pleasure that I thought it was time to collaborate with him and the Armory Center on a mid-career retrospective.”

Lavi Daniel is a meat and potatoes painter. At the Armory Center for the Arts, a mid-career overview of his works on canvas, panel and paper is true to the ethos at the heart of his art. Organized by guest curator Anne Ayres, “Parables of Space: Lavi Daniel: A Twenty-Four-Year Survey” puts substance ahead of style. The visually satisfying and emotionally rich exhibition avoids the glamour and trendiness that often accompany contemporary art and sticks, instead, to what Daniel does best: hearty paintings whose pleasures are part of their unfancy earthiness.