Madeira-based artist Daniel V. Melim is showing the exhibition O Animal e as Roupas at Lisbon’s Monitor gallery.

He has been developing a body of work clearly alluding to childhood events and memories of the island which, drawing on his extensive photo archive, gradually uncovers local customs and popular knowledge, whilst keeping in mind a contemporary plastic touch that lends it new guises and significance.

Melim, for this series, is painting on smooth surfaces, particularly glass supports, something he calls “acrylic paint without support”. Contrary to canvas or other surfaces used in conventional painting, the artist works on glass and begins by painting the details first, such as figures or objects, and only then applies plastic paint layers to make the backgrounds more recognisable.

As visitors enter the gallery, they immediately see a long strip of paint on the glass window with a figure in the centre, a 2023 intervention called as montanhas são famílias de pedras.

This exhibition begins outside the venue premises, offering passers-by, unused to visiting the gallery but who wander past it during the hectic day-to-day life, the chance to have an aesthetic experience as well.

This invitation binds the exterior to a perfectly coherent interior. Inside, we recognise the works, again in the same technique, but independent, pulled from the glass supports, radiating an ecstatic light. Human figures are always embellished by a sidereal night sky. The starry backgrounds, painstakingly positioned, recall the very essence of painting (reminiscent of Pollock), or its elements, as Greenberg would have it, carrying with them the gestures, the particles, the cosmic and twilight sense of matter. In communion or isolated, human figures are always closely related to this interstellar background, engaged in a perpetual dialogue. There is a bond, a feeling of complicity. The artist wonders: “Who would have thought of creating this existential game? What nail anchors to the infinity wall this suit of being a human body that we wear every morning when we wake up?”

This existential uncertainty always seems to connect and follow all the exhibited works. But there is something that harbours a certain spiritual connection, a relationship based on understanding, on love communion. Made possible by the human figures depicted in group activities, perfectly aligned with nature, or in isolation, seeking meaning for the soul’s questions. Melim decals these skies, this firmament, to remind us of how important humans are to the life cycles and natural laws.

Similar to the traditional Haiku genre, the works on display are like tiny poems linking themselves to nature[1]. Where everyone learns about the importance of the landscape and how life depends on it[2]. Nature has the power to instruct us in what is beyond our control, what is foreign to us, and it regenerates itself, whatever our understanding of the subject, or comprehension, however broad it may be. This understanding brings us to a state of humility and awareness of the incommensurability of what connects us all: doubt, but also love, something that unifies and heals.

This is where Melim’s latest work situates us in ancestry, mysticism and cosmology. These themes have recently come to the forefront of contemporary art, much due to environmental awareness and the impact of ethnocentrism, liberalism and unbridled capitalism.

Melim’s works feature different human figures positioned at a high point in the composition: some on staircases, others isolated, as in estrela diária (2023), others carrying bodies on their backs, seemingly lifeless, to better make the transition of souls to other lives. This can be seen in Ascenção, from 2023, in acrylic on glass.

The attachment to ancestral knowledge, “without nostalgia or idealism”, as the artist correctly points out, is achieved through a flicker of resources, not only from painting, but from other media. Voice, sound, bodily expression and spoken word contribute to embodying the message of an art that Melim feels can be useful. A functional magical art, drawing on the past[3], but at the same time “committed to the present moment”, a generous art, as Melim says, “at the service of the social fabric”[4], where the artist “fits in”.

The exhibition is open until November 25.

[1]James Elkins & Rachael de Lue (2008) Landscape theory. Routledge. New York and London. page 44

[2] Ibidem

[3] “alvo negro”, featured in the exhibition, exalts shamanic figures.

[4] https://www.danielvm.com/info.html