Blank Out

Pascal Danz's paintings are simultaneously seductive, troubling and broodingly romantic. Sensual in terms of their colour and detail, they put ravishment out of reach by refusing to give the full picture, reflecting instead the multiple and fragmentary effects of city life that demand that we interpret the work as part of an ongoing narrative. Both emotionally dense and intellectually engaging, his canvases also have a physicality created by a tactile and varied vocabulary of brushstrokes. Working only from existing photographs, primarily widely available images sourced from the internet, Danz investigates the in-between identity of painting, creating a continuous shift between the reality of place And The virtual or painterly version. He secures our attention with the familiarity of the image in order to move beyond it, To investigate abstract notions such as space, mood and light as well as the status of the image between presentation, representation and disappearance. In placing the medium of painting in question - its transitory status between the actual And The imagined, description and meaning ndash; Danz presents it as being burdened with the melancholy of memory. Filtered and mediated, his paintings are invested with new meaning yet cannot but retain the memory of the original image. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Pascal Danz: blank out at Haunch of Venison, Zurich, October ndash; November 2008.