For the Solo/Duo section of Art Rotterdam 2024 we are proposing a presentation with recent work, especially painting by two artists in dialogue: Dutch artist Domas van Wijk and Spanish artist Bernat Daviu.
The interest in what happens outside the work, what escapes and will escape the artist's control, is what triggers the works selected for this presentation. Anecdotal elements, apparently disconnected from the works of art, acquire a high symbolic potential when they enter into dialogue with them. It is these elements that both artists have chosen to weave a story that runs along the fine line between what is intentional and what is accidental, the result of a certain place and time.
These external interferences in the work are represented by Daviu in the form of shadows, presences without volume that indicate precisely the opposite, the nearby presence of a volumetric body. This is how subtle presences appear on monochrome surfaces or antique paintings by other artists that Daviu buys in markets or at bargain prices in auction houses. Equally Domas van Wijk’s works and the combination between them point to the fundamentality of the selection, forms of display, and contextual framing. Van Wijk takes familiar things – that are part of our day-to-day urban environment – to create highly suggestive alternative readings of these known things.