Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Daniel Sinsel at Galpão, featuring eight new paintings that explore interests in space, eroticism and illusion. His work shifts between a traditional pictorial vocabulary, made with great technical virtuosity, and a more object-based painting, which establishes peculiar associations with linen, glass, nuts and ornaments.

Sinsel was raised in Bavaria, Germany, home to the Lüftlmalerei folk Muralism, whose development stems from the strong influence of Baroque and Rococo, and is characterized by the use of trompe l’oeil and the imitation of architectural elements. In the artist’s work, decorative motifs are redesigned in various forms, such as in the ornaments framing the margins of the pieces – sometimes virtuously painted, sometimes achieved through assemblages – and in the bullseye glass discs attached to the surface of the canvas to emulate window decorations. His signature winding ribbons synthesize such influence and are a key element to understand his painting, as they comprise technical virtuosity, virtual space, emotional and semantic flow.

In the largest works from the show, the ribbon is shaped like a linen tape, meticulously hand-woven onto the stretcher in which the artist wraps or stashes hazelnut shells. Lending a tactile quality to the surface of the paintings, the nuts are symbols of a procreative life force, but also reference the obsessive nature implied in the process of gathering and hiding them. Eroticism, a defining aspect of his early works in the 2000s, appears in the form of what is in and out of the canvas, that is, what is presented or hidden from sight.

The desire to impose movement in his figures is also recurrent in Sinsel. It is revealed in the sinuous dance of the ribbons, the opening and closing of the scissors, and in the elements that move off center in his compositions. The “tasteful” pale color scheme is interrupted by acrid hues of orange or red, resulting in an effect that the artist compares to the disturbing image of Notre Dame Cathedral going up in flames. Sinsel uses undiluted pigments of cadmium, lead, mercury, cobalt and tin mostly in an unmixed state. Toxicity is as embedded in the painting as are the nuts.

Daniel Sinsel was born in Munich in 1976. He lives and works in London, where he studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and at the Royal College of Art. His work has been included in several international exhibitions, such as: ISelf Collection: The Upset Bucket, Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2017); Disobedient Bodies, The Hepworth Wakefield (2017); British Art Show 8, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, which traveled through various institutions across the United Kingdom (2016-2017); Making & Unmaking, Camden Arts Centre (London, 2016); MIRRORCITY: 23 London Artists, Hayward Gallery (London, 2014); Somewhat Abstract, Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, 2014); Jerwood Contemporary Painters, Jerwood Space (London, 2010); Compass in Hand, MoMA (New York, 2009). His work is part of important collections, such as MoMA (New York), and the Arts Council Collection (London).