Daniele Genadry
∗1980, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
In her painterly and graphic works, the Lebanese-American artist Daniele Genadry is primarily concerned with different forms of perception, and how certain histories and images produce specific ways of seeing. She is particularly interested in how instability (such as war or crises) can create a heightened perception. Through the material surface of her paintings, she attempts to physically irritate the viewer’s gaze in order to elicit a longer and more conscious mode of looking, where their attention is held by (landscape) images that hover between presence, fragility and disappearance.For Bienniale Gherdëina 9, Daniele Genadry realised a new series of small-format paintings in which, based on the photographic image, she explores the various facets of light that envelop distant mountain landscapes at different moments of the day and year. To this end, she uses a pastel-coloured palette of pale pink and orange tones and creates low-contrast, light-flooded and partly reflective picture surfaces, as in an overexposed photograph, so that the legibility and recognisability of the landscapes depicted is only possible with great effort and concentration. And so the visual grasp of what is depicted remains an illusion, because the forms that seem to emerge from the nebulous swathes of light dissolve again at the same moment, similar to the silhouettes of the “pale mountains”, the Dolomites, which only shine in bright pink on the threshold between day and night, namely in the glow of the setting sun, before their contours evaporate with the disappearance of the light. In this way, the artist thematises the interplay between perception and recognition, and shows us the mountain landscape as a transitory and vulnerable reality.
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