Daniel Cayo

Daniel Cayo is a French artist born in 1947 who lives & works in Eragny sur Oise, France. According to the artist, contemporary art is no longer a meticulous reconstruction of what exists. It tends much more to circumscribe the movements of man and the world. To do this, he has restored to each colour, each form, its own life; the work is a totality detached from reality, an island in itself, enclosing the spectator in the endless questioning it raises; the relevance of painting, of the act of painting even if its vocation is no longer the representation of an aesthetic ideal or even its sublimation, it is a question of connecting an individual mental space on a flat surface with the help of drawing, pigments, lines and forms organized in an autonomous place which is the pictorial space, with a voyeur individual and consumer of images, a sensory experience, a desperate quest to emerge the unspeakable. Plastic language tends to distance any idea that represents an immediately recognizable reality. Should we see in the creator of a contemporary art the desire for a singular expression to differentiate oneself from others or the escape from reality, a rejection of déjà vu, a desire for eternity, an act of humanity?

Daniel Cayo's painting tends to make readable a vocabulary of confrontation of forms, a writing of conciliation of opposites playing with different levels of perceived reality, creating a de facto image that emerges from a hortus conclusus of memory that should lead the viewer to ask himself: What am I being shown ? And what do I see ? To see is to have seen.