PLACE
Place du Châtelain 37
[just opposite Hangar-art center]
1050 Brussels
Life first. But which? And how to approach the mystery? For Daniel Enkaoua, the answers are sought in the deepest, most fragile and most intimate realms of the everyday.
Always, it seems, in the Barcelona studio that adjoins the place where he lives, his partner and then Liel, Aure, Natan, his children, come to pose for him. The exhibition brings together the last three years of this work. Aure in blue, Aure in red, Liel protected by a green hood or Natan, standing, his thin bare torso. They keep their eyes closed or offer them up, wide open. The lips remain sealed. Immobile, they are neither actors nor prophets. They are. There, vibrant and secret. Like fruits and vegetables bought in the nearby market, which the painter has carefully set out on a table. A watermelon, some peppers, two lettuces. The purpose is the same, served by this tension that links the painter (his eye, his mind and his hand) and the space that separates him from the models. Placed in light touches here, more solidly supported somewhere else, encircling a volume or, on the contrary, effacing the outlines, the hues gradually make the work appear, solar and restrained on a background as subtle in its tinted greys as it is undefined. The colours glance, touch, caress and clash at the tempo of the emotion to which the body language bears witness. Because, as the painter knows, each instant, be it only the moment of the look, also possesses the weight of the ephemeral.