# 520, 2020

Daniel Gonçalves  

Daniel Gonçalves was born in Portugal in 1977 into a turbulent family of five boys, from a carpenter father who behaved violently but who passed on to him a sense of manual work and rigor. It was artistic expression that allowed Daniel to channel a hyperactive and obsessive temperament and find a psychological balance essential to his life. He currently leads an existence punctuated by his family life during the day and drawing at night, a precise and immutable ritual, in the same place, with the same tools, which gave birth to his hypnotic work.

Entirely self-taught, Daniel tirelessly traces lines, circles, points, geometric shapes by hand, guided by an inner power, in an irrepressible way, in search of purity and perfection of line. The first years he drew only with black ink and on a single format (50 x 70 cm), then later he added a few colors, mainly red and gold, and now allows himself different formats, sometimes several meters.

His precise drawings might at first glance give the impression of having been constructed in an extremely thoughtful manner, in the manner of the protagonists of optical art of the last century, but this is not the case! His work is a spontaneous creation, without prior construction, an intimate raw expression, pure product of his unconscious. He creates in a state of meditative concentration, a sort of trance, which could recall that of mediumistic artists. His graphic representations are an esoteric vision that evoke the cogs that govern our world.

We are carried by the curves, guided by the lines, caught by the concentric circles, oriented by the symbols, as if caught in a Möbius strip, for an infinite journey.

In just a few years, Daniel Gonçalves has built a unique universe rich in nearly a thousand drawings, with its forms and laws, which we never tire of exploring, work after work, without ever having looked at it all.