Together with Marlene Dumas, Dutch painter René Daniëls is without doubt the most influential artist from the Netherlands since the 1980s. His witty, adventurous and ambiguous paintings stem from the no man’s land between art and life, between idea and image. This enigmatic picture was made in 1982, when the artist rapidly rose to international fame through his participation in major exhibitions such as Documenta 7, Kassel, and Zeitgeist, Berlin. Eindelijk Depicts a slumbering female figure. Her bed seems to be afloat at sea, silently rocking on the waves. The interior is on the drift, so to speak, setting out to wander into dark and undiscovered territories, a descent into the realm of dreams. This blurring of the division between interior and exterior, between consciousness and subconsciousness, is characteristic of Daniëls work. The welcome intimacy of the night, the recluse of sleeping alone, is greeted in the title: Eindelijk (Finally). A gouache with a similar motif in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and a related painting from the collection of the Groninger Museum, Groningen, both bear the title Eindelijk alleen (Finally alone), 1982. Curiously, the moon is not single but doubled. The two floating circles seem to anticipate the soap bubbles drifting above the ocean that appear in Daniëls’ later works. They also allude to a motif that surfaces repeatedly in this highly self-referential body of work: two dots fighting over one "I". Here, the double dots are two moons, the "I" being the rod or brush in the hand of the sleeping beauty. In several works of Daniëls, the theme of the double dot above one "I" functions as a battleground for conflicting interests, possibly the rivalry between two men over one woman. As Marlene Dumas once wrote: “One is alone, two is a couple, three is politics.”
by Dominic van den Boogerd
Director, De Atelier, Amsterdam
