Human Mountain by Daniel Enkaoua at Montserrat’s Museum
Enkaoua, settled in Barcelona since 2004, presents a compendium of the decade lived in Catalonia, after spending 20 years in Israel. The fifty works on exhibit show a variety of motives and pretexts, mainly portraits, still natures and landscapes. Enkaoua obtains a great expressive efficiency of his works, up to the point that we can affirm that the artist is revitalising these genres. Some portraits of laying bodies unfold before us like an authentic landscape, and some still natures almost have the presence of a portrait. Montserrat’s geomorphic structure opens his “doors of perception” and places him before this fruitful process of contamination and transfer. Therefore, the title of the exhibition is Human Mountain: the artist has been painting some of his most significant works under the mountain’s shelter, from certain evident landscapes to some portraits of laying bodies that appear to us as an authentic mountain range.
The faces of his four children or his wife, their laying or standing bodies, alone or embraced; the pumpkins, the calçots, leeks, tomatoes, quinces or grape berries; the views of Penedès region’s plain, all of them recurrent motifs with which Daniel Enkaoua composes his personal symphony of gratitude. Hence, art is a thanksgiving, and painting, one of the most effective means to reveal the whole burden of mystery, sense and beauty contained in the smallest trace of reality. An exhibition like this is nothing but a deep gallery of presences that question and move us.
The exhibition Human Mountain by Daniel Enkaoua can be visited from Monday to Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m at Sala Daura of Montserrat’s Museum from 9th June until 2nd October 2016.
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