“Inter faeces et urinam nascimur”  (Between feces and urine, we are born.)

Latin locution attributed to San Agustín

The news from the planet is not good at all. When were they?

Although not exclusive, the human body occupies a central place in the pictorial work of Daniel Berman, often represented by elongated legs and elastic arms and sometimes without trunks or heads. On this occasion, Berman pierces the skin and exposes hidden organs inside the body. Well, that reading is mine. The artist himself claims to represent knots instead of the intestines that he identified. This introspection takes you – still according to my gaze – to a normally hidden part of our metabolism located at the end of the digestive system. I would briefly like to risk interpreting this supposed choice as a metaphor for another system that emits more and more rumblings and that imposes contortions and precarious balances on us to remain standing.

Intestines or knots then, thin and thick, colored blue, red, and black, but also yellow and green, run inside the perimeter of canvases and sheets of paper like long bacteria with teeming bodies. Something viral invaded Berman's creative space announcing the previous series of intertwined bodies without mentioning the health situation in recent years. Berman has been working for a while in a large workshop in Xalapa that was previously a food factory. The walls of the room are covered with shiny white tiles, the kind that we find in various places, in kitchens and laboratories. It is in this generous and luminous space that Berman experiments with new media beyond drawing and painting, although this pictorial practice constitutes the raw material and continues to be the starting point for animations and other videos.

These performances refer to primitive, intriguing, and enigmatic rituals. Impression or rather an atmosphere reinforced by the proximity of elegant dark palm trees under a perfectly blue sky. I saw in Baja California, in the Cirios Valley, some palm trees that preserve and display their withered palms from their green tops to the ground, completely hiding their trunks. They look like Africans dancing during sacred rituals! Berman makes a ball of a green drawing, grabs this volume and takes it from here to there, lays it on the floor, turns around, places it again, unfolds it, and runs with it, hiding his face under the drawing. This action by Berman moving one of his drawings in a ball around the workshop reproduces some of these rituals as if the artist and his drawing formed a single entity or as if one depended on the other without knowing who the drawing or its author is the servant of the other so that osmosis works.

The artist embodies his work.

Michel Blancsubé