Fragmented Reality: Daniel Fleur - Luisa Catarinéu

We open a new exhibition in our Madrid space by established Swedish artist Daniel Fleur, who returns once again to Tönnheim Gallery with his exquisite, figurative and detailed paintings after having done over a dozen exhibitions together (including group shows and art fairs) since the start of our collaboration in Sweden in 2015, alongside the emerging Spanish artist Luisa Catarinéu, who makes her debut show with the gallery. 

There is a paradox at the heart of Daniel Fleur’s paintings. Their subjects belong unmistakably to the present, yet they unfold with the measured attention of historical painting. Images drawn from the continuous flow of contemporary visual culture — shared photographs, fleeting encounters and everyday gestures — are translated through a process whose pace stands in contrast to the speed from which they originate. What first existed for only a moment becomes something that asks to be looked at. Fleur approaches painting not as a means of reproducing photographs, but of altering their conditions. The digital image is defined by immediacy, circulation and repetition; painting restores duration.

Luisa Catarinéu, born 1978 in Madrid, Spain, develops a painting practice centred on the gaze as a problem. Her work does not depict the everyday: it deactivates it. Domestic scenes, minimal gestures, and family relationships appear as structures in which the seemingly intimate reveals its collective dimension. Starting from the tension between looking and seeing, her painting introduces an uncomfortable distance between what happens and its recognition. Under the notion of the voyeurism, her figures inhabit non-performative moments, instances in which identity manifests itself outside the public, when the awareness of being observed disappears. Far from the anecdotal, her work activates a precise reading of the structures that permeate everyday life: reconciliation, transmission, and the construction of identity. In a context saturated with images, Catarinéu does not add more noise: she introduces friction, compelling us to look where it seemed we had already seen.