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3/12/2003

Daniel Enkaoua

Marlborough Gallery, New York

Portraits, Landscapes & Still Lifes
Marlborough

The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are very pleased to announce the first exhibition in New York of work by the Israeli artist, Daniel Enkaoua.

Enkaoua was born in 1962 in Meaux, France and studied painting at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv. He currently lives and works in Jerusalem.

This exhibition will comprise some 60 paintings of strong landscapes, incisive portraits and delicate still lifes. Enkaoua's use of paint, despite its understated harmonies and its restrained scale, is a highly dramatic vehicle which makes him one of the most fascinating painters today. Occasionally his canvases of landscapes and still lifes are mistaken for abstractions, although in reality they become an invocation of life. Enkaoua is also recognized for creating masterpieces of the Israeli landscape: the paintings portray the country with its mysterious light and ground bleached pale by the heat with glimpses of color glimmering through in the composition. In the process of creativity, Enkaoua uses his palms, his hands, and fingers, as well as making scratches that are like writing on the canvas. His initial layer of paint seems barely to cover the surface leaving it dry, like the sands of the desert, yet luminescent as the sky. His colors are subtle and the tonalities patiently modulated through lavenders and pinks. The image in the studio is a reflection of the landscape. As the artist says: "The outside is living in my painting." Susan Chevlowe, art historian and curator, gives a fascinating insight into Enkaoua s process of painting in the introduction to the catalogue. She writes that: "In a series of self-portraits painted during a three-year period from 2001-2003 Enkaoua worked back and forth between form and color sacrificing one in order to open possibilities for the other. Sometimes to achieve what he was looking for in the color he had to destroy the form. Or for explorations of form to progress, color was eliminated." Just as importantly, Enkaoua tells us: "It s very important to create, not to give up." As Arturo Schwarz describes in his book Love at First Sight: The Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Israeli Art (Jerusalem, 2001), Enkaoua s "main and only concern is to mirror the model [and this can be also applied to his still lifes and landscapes] in the most impartial, and at the same time involved, way. This dialectic and complementary interplay between objectivity and subjectivity, coupled with a consummate painting technique, accounts for the extraordinary appeal of his work." Since his first, very successful, exhibition in London at Marlborough Fine Art in 1996, Enkaoua s most important works have consistently sold at the Basel and Maastricht art fairs. His work is included in the collection of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. A fully illustrated catalogue will be available at the time of the exhibition.

Marlborough Gallery
Marlborough 40 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019
telephone 212.541.4900 telefax 212.541.4948

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