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Beyond simply giving aesthetic and practical value to everyday objects, the artist gives objects a political value and conveys a civic message of eco-responsible commitment: not overconsuming, producing nothing new, and adapting his practice to the resources the planet can still offer us. These reflections belong to the idea of the circular economy, Cradle to Cradle, rendered in French as « du berceau au berceau ». When Daniel Nicolaevsky Maria paints a highly symbolic portrait on the slats of a cradle found in the street, the metaphor takes on its full resonance.
The work, made up of seven painted bed bases hung from braided ropes, confronts the viewer with the effects of the Plantationocene and its neo-colonial practices on the present state of the world. Painted on the slats of the bed bases are animals and peoples representing the tropical jungle and the European colonies or former colonies that today suffer ecological and human devastation. In this immersive installation, the public is invited to walk behind the bed bases and feel, through the sound of the Amazon rainforest, the sharp opposition between the largest reservoir of biodiversity on our planet and the threats weighing on it: global warming, gold panning and deforestation. With this piece, the expression « from cradle to cradle » takes on its full resonance.
Isabelle de Maisonrouge, 2024
Translated from the original French.
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from one identity to the other
From one identity to the other,
from one language to the other
from one continent to the other,
from one country to the other,
Daniel Nicolaevsky Maria never stops crossing borders,
crossing limits, those that confine, those that prevent and partition.
From his personal trajectory to the course of his productions, he plays with and outplays these borders,
these shackles, and joyfully allows himself to pass from one territory to another, from one production to another, from one scale to another and from one modality to another.
In a constant and subtle search for a point of balance between all the realities that make him up, between all the forms and modalities he sets to work, Daniel builds plural devices that allow him to cross tangible as well as mental spaces.
And so he moves from photography to the object, from writing to dance and performance: from the immaterial to the material, from density to lightness and from mass to evanescence.
His research brings him close to the children of the favelas, whom he looks at with empathy, to portraits he fragments to better mark the unity of the subjects he photographs, but it also leads him towards the dimension of play which, as serious as pleasure, he never avoids.
In the tangle of bodies and gestures, postures appear and take shape and, in doing so, mark space and modify it. Slowly, scenographies unfold and plays of light make Daniel’s work on space, rhythm and the body all the more palpable.
Slowly, he radicalises his approach and his experiments and dares to affirm this contradiction between the body, dense, compact, massive, and the grace, dexterity and ease of movement and of moving through space.
But he does not give up the sensuality of colour and natural materials, which enter into dialogue with the video image, film and media players. Here again, the alliance of seemingly contradictory elements finds a point of balance.
Searching for himself through the other, searching for his own body through the body of the other, there, in this search and this work, the body becomes the stake of all research as much as the place of all possibilities. Thus the artist, in a relentless and determined search, connects the sensual to the intellect, pleasure to the mind: the carnal and the spiritual.
At a point of balance.
Gaya Goldcymer, Paris. 2019
Translated from the original French.
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With Daniel Nicolaevsky Maria, even a simple sweep of the broom can, in the blink of an eye, become the opening of a true contemporary ballet.
This is what the artist showed at his degree show with a performance-spectacle that he conceived and carried out himself in a martial mode. Barefoot, bare-chested and right on the floor of the Chapel of the Beaux-Arts, his performance, entitled « De la guerre à l’art » (From War to Art), seems to defy, with superb assurance, centuries of classical art and in particular a reproduction of Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Colleoni.
Commanding the space like a warrior, he nonetheless carries a message of peace, which he materialises through his shirt, turned into a white flag. As sensual as it is radical, supple and vigorous, his work alludes to slavery and to the cause of minorities around the world.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, to the sound of carnival and Evangelical hymns, he studied visual arts and 3D animation in São Paulo as much as he practised samba, zouk and tango every day. That was before devoting himself entirely to contemporary dance with Emmanuelle Huynh at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. In his personal pantheon, he cites the choreographers Philippe Découflé and Ralph Lemon, but also the performer Tino Sehgal and the video artist Steve McQueen.
This young artist, who takes art in both arms and does not hesitate to bring video and song into his work, was awarded the Prix des Amis des Beaux-Arts in 2019 and presented a performance for the occasion at the Galerie du Jour/agnès b. With ropes hung in the gallery as his only prop, and in reference to the « four Toltec agreements », he addressed the question of attachment and social bonds in general.
Harnessed, suspended above the ground, he appeared as a force of nature, yet steeped in wisdom and talent.
Anaïd Demir. Paris, 2020
Translated from the original French.