DANIEL HEIDKAMP
MAKE HAY
Artist Reception: September 6th, 6-8 PM
September 6th - October 4th, 2023
Daniel Heidkamp: Make Hay
In “The Decay of Lying” which Oscar Wilde wrote as a companion essay to “Dorian Gray,” the author contends that nature imitates art. He’s talking about this idea that we only perceive what we can conceive. There were no fogs in London until artists started painting them and all of a sudden people were dying of respiratory illnesses. Oscar Wilde was into this notion, almost his way of doing art criticism. Liberties were taken to make his point. The simple fact that art was superior to nature. Reclining on a divan looking at a Ralph Albert Blakelock painting of a waterfall in the moonlight meant the viewer needn’t contend with soggy trousers sitting in a mossy field while ants crawled up their leg…..just to enjoy the same point of view the artist depicted.
This preamble serves as a primer to the works of Daniel Heidkamp. From the coasts of Massachusetts to the foothills of Griffith Park, from the 3rd arrondissement to the Spanish Steps, Heidkamp has traveled the globe under the banner of plein air painting.
This new group of pictures emerge from his ongoing investigation into the art historical landscape of the South of France: mapping the seashores, mountains, and villages employed as inspiration for so much important painting of the last centuries right up until today. By returning to these special places, Heidkamp is replanting the seeds that grew into impression, fauvism, and cubism, hopefully allowing a new flower to grow, a new harvest.
Over the past few years he has been fortunate to make several trips to this region - art roadtrips - journeying through various locales, painting and drawing along the way, as well as gathering photographs and ephemera from these spots all of which serve as source material for the larger works painted in his Sunset Park studio in Brooklyn.
Perhaps the best means by which to capture the essence of these paintings and the thoughts that go into them is to follow along from west to east as Heidkamp drove along on his most recent trip to France in July.
“A Day in Ceret” is set in an artful mountain town on the border of Spain and France. This town is where Braque and Picasso worked side by side to create some of the earliest cubist paintings. Heidkamp’s painting shows the center of town with the arching courtyard, where there is a recent fountain dedicate to Picasso. However when Heidkamp arrived in Ceret there was a large festival going on and the fountain was covered in plywood to make space for the Catalan food vendors, so he opted to depict the space without the trace of Picasso. Including, instead, tall, colorful trees offset by the architecture and distant mountain landscape that gave rise to abstraction.
“The Midi” depicts a section of the Canal du Midi, which was begun in the 1600s in an effort to make a shipping route that connects the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The Canal, which is in total 150 miles long, meanders through farmland and vineyards, and has a series of locks as it passes through various cities and villages like the castle town of Carcassonne that appears in the distance of his painting. Artists such as Matisse and Raoul Dufy made paintings of the Canal, and in Heidkamp’s rendition the artist attempts a large scale, almost dreamlike view of the Canal capturing more distance that a camera could in an explosion of fauvist colors.
“Montmajour” reveals an Abbey ruin where Van Gogh would often paint during his tumultuous yet extremely productive years in Arles. Visitors can still enter the Abbey to this day, and this view looks very much the same as in Van Gogh’s renderings. Heidkamp tried to capture the sunburnt and dusty ocher farmland dotted with colorful crops and the distance mountains of the Crau.
“Aix”, shows Mount Sainte-Victiore that Cezanne could see from his studio in Aix-en-Provence and famously painting dozens of times. While his versions were broken down with washy colors and choppy linear brushstrokes that are often thought to have given rise to the cubism of subsequence generations, Heidkamp created a hyper color interpretation, as if predicting the post-impressionistic spirit that arose from the work of Cezanne, but also taking it somewhere new for our time.
“Make Hay” focuses on a haystack as set in Arles. There is a tradition of painting haystacks that goes back probably to the beginning of painting, but notably in Brueghel, Monet, and of course Van Gogh. Something about the doming shape all the sticks and shadows, described with the brushstrokes and colors of oil painting, the haystack becomes like a symbolic totem for art and abstraction.
“La Piscine” and “Pool en Plein Air” are both set in the Commune of Var, near Saint-Tropez, which is known for inspiring French New Wave filmmakers, as many important scenes in Goddard “Pierrot La Fou” takes place in the area, as well as the movie “La Piscine” which was filmed in a villa in the town of Ramatulle. Heidkamp’s painting “La Piscine” uses that movie as a jumping off point to capture the luxury and suspense of the film, while emphasizing the rolling hills and farmland that pop up in the distance with a touch of Van Gogh’s spirit to show how contemporary filmmakers also look to painting for inspiration.
“Eze Swirl” shows a view of the Mediterranean as from the Cactus Garden and Nietzsche path in Eze. This is a continuation of the series of swirl paintings which is Heidkamp’s way of capturing the often overwhelming vistas of the Mediterranean sea with is currents of turquoise waters, boat wakes, and cliffs--to use elements of surrealism and abstraction to capture the energy of the region.
“Fisherman’s Chapel” depicts a small church near the beach in Villefranche-Sur-Mer that Jean Cocteau decorated in 1956. Heidkamp wanted to capture the dazzling Mediterranean light as set against the surreally painted building to show how art seems to bubble up straight out of the land and architecture in this area. The chapel also reminded Heidkamp of the wildly painted building directly across the street from Half Gallery, and he thought it would be compelling to hang this picture in a way that creates a visual fission between painting and life, France and NYC.
Daniel Heidkamp (born 1980, Wakefield, MA) lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA in 2003. Solo exhibitions include Half Gallery (New York), Loyal Gallery (Stockholm), Pace Prints (New York), Acquavella Gallery (Palm Beach) and White Columns (New York). Group exhibitions include Almine Rech (New York), Derek Eller Gallery (New York), Brand New Gallery (Milan), Wilkinson Gallery (London), Marlborough Chelsea (New York), The Journal Gallery (New York), Jack Hanley Gallery (New York) and The Ranch (Montauk).
Heidkamp’s work was included in the exhibition “Talking Pictures” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017, and his work from this exhibition is now included in The Met’s permanent collection. Heidkamp is featured in the book Landscape Painting Now published by D.A.P.