Daniel
DE LA ROSA

My work explores our relationship to the materials we touch, use and discard daily; as well as our relationship to the thoughts we touch, use, and discard daily. Materials usually taken for granted are compiled, transformed, and planted in new permanent homes. These materials are sown within the soils of emotion, memory, and spontaneous thought. Selections for expression are made instinctually each session of creation. Each surface is continually new until finished, always containing the potential for growth until its final moments. Each finished piece is a memorial of the life it lived, the sessions it survived, and the reflections of the energy at that point in spacetime. Each piece’s lifespan is different, some living fully, joyfully, completely in one session; while others suffer, learn, grow, and mature over years. Some rest peacefully, arising fully formed after a long hibernation. Each contains a quantifiable amount of gravity/love, measured in its weight, layers.

When possible, many of these paintings incorporate found, discarded and recycled materials. Plastic wrappers from cereal bags, pasta boxes, small utensil wrappers, leftover tape, and much more are collected, washed and combined into surfaces to provide a new expressive life, fulfilling its destiny to rest somewhere besides the ocean, the ground, or our bodies. So too can any potentially harmful thoughts, find a new peaceful, permanent, loving home of rest; no longer in need of processing, thought or material. No further action needed.

My subject matter also draws directly from reality. Representation pulling from memory or from life, abstraction sourced from realtime emotional expression or reflection upon a memory.

These meditative sessions are similar to asanas in a yoga practice. They are repeated until they are themselves conscious and form and formless are united.

danieljdlr@gmail