Een zaal boven de pacific

The title of the present lot refers to a motive Daniels has worked on for two years, from 1984-1986. Een zaal boven de pacific is in its simplest form a schematically represented space with two side walls and one back wall. On these walls coloured fields can be seen, exhibited paintings in a conventional exhibitional setting. It's an emblematical image, without any spatial illusion. Daniels called this group of works Mooie tentoonstellingen. (..) This theme originates in De slag om de twintigste eeuw (1984), which shows a butterfly tie floating above the sea. In the paintings to follow the tie is put in perspective which makes clear that it also can be seen as a spatial architectonical construction with three walls.'Because we can see the ties as picture galleries, the 'paintings' become trophies, like pinned butterflies. They make Mooie Tentoonstellingen (Beautiful exhibitions), what is actually exhibited is less important: all planes on the wall are even, do not refer to anything and do not represent anything. The series is called beautiful exhibitions and not beautiful paintings, not without reason. Philip Peeters suggests that one of the reasons for the fact that the paintings 'have no face', is the way we (the viewers, the consumers) hastily visit beautiful exhibitions: every exhibition is a new trophy. (Philip Peters in exh.cat. Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum René Daniels,1998, p. 31.)