Pascal Danz’s painting moves between the poles of figuration and abstraction and addresses questions of reality and the possibility of its representation. The access to reality filtered through the media served Danz as a basis. Since 1996 he has been collecting photographs from newspapers and magazines, digital images from the Internet and personal photographs, which have been the source material for his artworks and the stimulus for his painterly examination. He edited the photographic material in part digitally and subjected it to his own pictorial concept, eliminating details and thus obscuring the historical-documentary. He often chose unspectacular motifs as a basis for reflection or images that were irritating because of their dubious quality of reproduction and not necessarily intended „mistakes“, such as overexposure or the specific choice of detail. The treatment of light and its reflections runs like a red thread through his entire œuvre and has been a determining factor in Pascal Danz’s passion for the exploration of painting. Light not only serves to make things visible, but also to conceal the obvious motif through too little or too much lighting. He masterfully understood how to focus on trivialities, to fade out supposed main motifs and to include photographic features such as points of light or overexposure in a reflection on seeing and perception. This often resulted in works that are characterized by reduction and fragmentation, and that unfold a suggestive, distanced effect. The painting appears as if distanced from itself, creating an emptiness in which reflection takes up space. The artist was interested in these empty spaces and the subjectivity of their perception as well as in the examination of reproduction media and their relationship to painting.
Pascal Danz created groups of works that were created over several years. He characterized people, situations, moods, objects, interiors, still lifes, cityscapes, architectures and landscapes by reducing them to the most elementary and depicting them in his paintings as a reappearance of the illusion of reality. Through the examination of the „surface“ of painting, access is gained to his conceptual art, to the thought processes behind it: questions of perception, reality and painting itself. In the withdrawal of the narrative and anecdotal, the reduction of colour and the simplification of forms and structures, Pascal Danz emphasises the process of viewing works of art as the primary and complex concern of his painting.
Pascal Danz’s work mainly comprises paintings and works on paper. There is also a series of photographs, which he saw as an independent artistic work, as well as some prints, sketchbooks and „Kunst am Bau“ projects.
Caroline Komor Müller, 2020