Detail of Blake Daniels, Agony in the Garden of Gale, 2023.
Photo: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Next Big Thing: Blake Daniels
The emerging creative’s work explores the human relationship to violence, yearning, love, loss, and more
Artist Blake Daniels stands in front of Mogodu Monday or The Leaving of Angels from Carletonville (2023). Photo: THOMAS MARRONI
Personal memory and storytelling are at the heart of the dreamlike, expressive canvases of Blake Daniels. With ties to Kentucky and Ohio, and now living in Paris, he bases his practice on “making sense of the world and of our relationships—to each other, to violence, to yearning, to love, to loss. All these big, human, esoteric questions.” Depicting enigmatic figures in surreal, unidentifiable landscapes, the works are underlined by the politics of gender and sexuality, “the subtle experiences of how we understand ourselves and our bodies and connection to everything around us.”
Pursuit of memory: “My paintings are like a struggle to hold up a place that I am not in anymore,” says the artist, who spent a formative decade living in Johannesburg. “I want to access that memory and unlock how it smelled, how it felt. You’re seeing a deep desire to preserve something that can’t be preserved.”
Unique process: Daniels works from drawings, writings, or scribbles. “I start composing these elements and building up the narratives that I want to tell—they involve references from many different times. They kind of collapse and merge into the compositions and the color choices.”
“Blake’s paintings are vulnerable and loving in a way that inspires feelings of kinship and belonging”
Kyla Mcmillan, director, the armory show
Blake Daniels, Love, 2023. Photo: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Blake Daniels, Agony in the Garden of Gale, 2023. Photo: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Inspirations: He cites Edvard Munch, Paul Cézanne, and Bob Thompson as references. “When I’m physically painting, though, I think more about the conversations and people and interactions that I’ve had,” he says.
Up next: Having been featured in a solo presentation of new works at NADA in Paris in the fall, Daniels is taking a short break to work on new ideas. “I need the time for experimentation and for failure, the time to slump.”
Blake Daniels, Death (Here Where the Land Subsides), 2023. Photo: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Blake Daniels, Self-Portrait (Apoptotic Corpus), 2024. Photo: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Blake Daniels, The Cave, 2023. Photo: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Winter Issue under the headline “Next Big Things.” Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: Detail of Blake Daniels, Agony in the Garden of Gale, 2023.
Photo: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
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