Daniel Domig’s work collected by State Collection of Austria

In his work Daniel Domig is never seeking to represent some pre-existent scene, or to express some pre-formulated idea, or to execute some pre-conceived plan. Instead Domig begins each time with his materials and with himself, and the work he creates is the engagement between the two: it is not that his works are the results of the inward journeys he undertakes, but rather that the works themselves are those journeys. Thus conceived the act of painting becomes a ritual act, an act involving the whole being both physical and mental, rather than an expression of the intellect alone. This is not in itself an anti-intellectual stance, but it is one which would deny to the mind, to the Cartesian res cogitans, to Laing’s inner self or to the ideal viewer created by the gallery, any privileged position. As Domig himself has expressed it, ‘the head must take its place alongside the other organs of the body.’

What Daniel Domig seems to seek, and what we may find in his work, is what was, according to Aristotle, granted to the mystai at Eleusis: not ‘mathein’ learning or knowledge, but ‘pathein’, experience. These are works born of an intense and unflinching inner gaze, works whose being is their becoming, works which, to borrow a phrase from Aeschylus, ‘suffer into truth’.

Gregor Sloss, Edinburgh 2014