26/03/2019 Severine Grosjean
The French writer Marc Dugain said “It is amazing how nature can kill all that is alive and let alive all that is dead.”* Nature is both initiation and instrument of death.
The young Brazilian artist Daniel Lie introduces the experience of life and death into gigantic installations composed of nylon, tropical fruits and hanging plants and plastic. Each component is carefully placed by a system of ropes. Daniel wishes to penetrate into the heart of the thought on life and death. Through a production loaded with symbolism, the artist appropriates a language whose aesthetics, feelings and emotions collide the fascination of this organic beauty with the inevitable experience that every man must undergo: death.
Daniel Lie celebrates the different stages of life evoked by the cycles of nature. The visitor with a solemn step faces with his own nature. Strolling between the structures of the installation, the public attends an inescapable ritual: its own end. Like Baudelaire and The Flowers of Evil, Daniel Lie nourishes with flowers and fruits the memory of human feelings between birth and death. In all his research, nature is a source of inspiration. Looking at the installations of this young artist, everyone perceives that each element “takes root” in designated “sacred” place. The suspensions split the airspace in which each body is related to the cosmos. Starting from ephemeral installations, Daniel Lie opposes complementary scientific and religious energies. He tells the story of life by blowing “Your second life begins when you understand that you only have one”. (Raphaëlle Giordano)
Time is the protagonist of the work. In a joint performance with his grandmother, Daniel talks about this family legacy. Daniel wishes to pay tribute to his family, a family of emigrants from Indonesia and Pernambuco, a region of northeastern Brazil. Hanging flowers and fruits are offered to the public in a circle around her grandmother sitting in the center and receiving her offerings like a goddess. Daniel Lee confronts the issues of inheritance and our position in relation to the past. This young artist raises a reflection on his identity and on the imprint of his family that he preserves and awakens through artistic creation.
Daniel Lie is part of this young generation of artists who express the family traditions bequeathed. In his last work, Daniel assembles colored fabrics that he costs as to build second-hand canvases on which phrases such as “Não faltava comida em casa” are inscribed. He sanctifies those phrases that accompanied his youth.
Humility, courage to survive, sacrifice remind us of the suffering that his family has experienced and echo the feeling that every migrant arriving on a new land is experimenting. With this gesture, Daniel Lie elaborates the relics as a testimony of the efforts made by his family to reinvent themselves in Sao Paulo.
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
*Free translation
