Disorder and Destiny
by Philippe Comar
Preface for the catalogue of the exhibition Lisier d’encre [Ink smudge] by Dany Danino, Félicien Rops museum, Namur, May-September 2016.
In 1674 Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a textile manufacturer from Delft, invented an instrument for verifying the purity of his fabrics – the microscope. His amazement was considerable when the spherical lens he used, able to magnify up to three hundred times, revealed an unknown and infinitely complex world. Fascinated by what he observed, Leeuwenhoek began examining all kinds of things under his microscope lens, from fly legs to the barbs of bird’s feathers, flea eggs, flower pistils, salt crystals, gunpowder, droplets of stagnating water and even sperm. The new universe he had just discovered was made up of delicate structures, suspended translucent algae, arborescent capillary networks dizzyingly branching out, a universe populated by strange creatures ornate with lashes and flagella their movement clearly showing that they were living beings. A world with no top or bottom nor left or right, apparently insusceptible to gravity and other elementary laws which govern the world of humans. Just a few years before, Galileo’s telescope had stretched the boundaries of the universe far beyond the visible, revealing an infinite number of worlds each with their own firmament, comets, suns and planets. Humankind, which had up until that moment stood firmly grounded on the certitudes provided by their senses, lost its foothold, swaying between the two Pascalian infinites – an imperceptible point with regard to the whole, a world with regard to the void.
Dany Danino’s latest series of lithographs plunges the viewer into the heart of a metaphysical vortex, a cultural “broth” in every sense of the word. Through the prism of his own optical instrument, the artist shows us the confusion of the world, leaving us rudderless – no reference table, no privileged vantage point from which we can find our bearings, no horizon. The direction in which we read the images is irrelevant – the artist himself having made his drawings from different directions. No form appears to have the upper hand. The field of observation is delimited only by the edges of the paper. Some prints even blatantly display what appear to be the missing sections of the images, almost as if the glass of the optic lens were broken or chipped.
Chaos reigns within the space dictated by the printing press. We have the impression of swimming through an undifferentiated magma of shapes and beings, with various strata superimposed over one another. In this maelstrom of often fragmented shapes are scattered aircraft fuselages, salamanders, houses, lead soldiers, crows, motors, planets, plants, all mixed in with ghostly figures. Their distorted proportions make any overall reading of the image impossible.
These prints are to be viewed from a distance as well as closely, in order to pick out shapes from amidst the profusion of tangled details – or to enable the almost subliminal image of a human head to emerge. This is a return to the world of forms as they were prior to being organised within a hierarchical space. We are immersed in a primordial soup – or maybe an apocalyptic vision prefiguring the end of the world, the head a billowing atomic blast. Any prolonged contemplation of these chaotic images sows the seed of doubt in the viewer’s mind – that the world as it has always been, along with the reasoned image we have of it, is nothing more than an illusion of our senses or our imagination.
Dany Danino’s previous works were a reminder not to stop at appearances. His body- landscapes brought to mind the tingling anatomies of Paolo Mascagni and Antonio Serantoni, replacing the meticulous description of organs with a succession of phantasmagorical manifestations of the spirit. Danino’s bodies appeared to have undergone a process of maturing and decomposition which had laid bare both their wondrous and shameful secrets. With their features still recognisable, these dream-like carcasses displayed their inner organs, offering to the viewer an agglomeration of heteroclite shapes, unlikely organs and ghostly limbs, combining the mineral, vegetal and animal worlds and weaving together past and future. Descendants of the portraits of Arcimboldo, Danino’s works declaimed an ability to destroy the cohesion of the human atom, revealing its irreducible heterogeneity – fission bombs destined to shatter the narcissist nucleus of the viewer to smithereens.
In his new series of prints, instead, Danino includes no bodies, saturating the images with other forms right up to the margins of the sheet. Were one to limit oneself to a mere double reading of these works, they could be compared to those series of postcards printed during the Great War, those showing the atrocities being committed and which – when gathered together in a certain order – made up a caricature portrait of the Kaiser. Danino’s series is incomplete, however, and we will never know whose parody they stand for or of which tyrant of the spirit they are the effigy. We remain confronted by chaos.
A characteristic so rarely found in artists and creatives, Dany Danino’s interest in disorder is worthy of being dwelt on here. All the great faiths, philosophical systems and almost all artworks, strive in some way to bring order – to arrange, distribute, classify, connect and bring together. The truth is that disorder could well turn out to be more fertile than order, more able to teach us something, a permanent source of interrogation. Bossuet, another contemporary of Leeuwenhoek’s, compared our perception of the world with that offered by anamorphosis, a perspective trick which was very much in fashion at the time: “A first glance reveals only shapeless lineaments, a confused mixture of colours resembling the effort of a dilettante or the scribblings of a child rather than the work of an expert hand. But as soon as he who knows their secret directs our gaze from a certain angle, those uneven lines gather together in a certain manner, all the confusion vanishes and we discern a face with all its lineaments and proportions where before there was no appearance of any human form. This, my lords, seems to me an exceedingly natural image of the world, of its apparent confusion and of its mysterious justice”1. In this sense, Dany Danino has demonstrated he is a man of the 1600s, a contemporary of Leeuwenhoek and Bossuet, a giant looking down at the confusion which reigns on a human scale through the prism of his optical instrument. But whereas in the 1600s anamorphosis served ideally to demonstrate how the world order could reveal itself only if observed from a unique, sovereign angle, Danino’s works lack any vantage point from which it is possible to unravel or resolve the confusion. The world they describe is ours, a world in which God is dead, a world of the atomic bomb, of the failure of the great ideologies and of a loss of historical understanding. They are riddles to which there is no solution, figures in our undecidable destiny.
And this is precisely what makes them so powerful, so disquieting.
- Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Sermon pour la deuxième semaine de Carême (Sermon for the second week of Lent), delivered Thursday March 9th, 1662 (tr. it Sermone primo per il giovedì della seconda settimana di Quaresima, recitato alla corte, in Sermoni di monsignor Jacopo-Benigno Bossuet vescovo di Meaux, Tomo IV, presso Pietro Merletti, Venice, 1800, p. 120).