Tom Thumb Painting

Daniel Derderian was born in Marseille, lives and work between Paris and Ghent in Belgium. With tender anger, Daniel Derderian deconstructs images in search of coherence between the social image and the particular sensation of being an individual. He seeks to unleash the strength and vulnerability that animates us by going back and forth between the surface and the bottom. He composes singular portraits representing the confusion and vanity of the human condition. Exploring the torsions of our souls, he highlights our particularities, our otherness, driven by a naïve desire to create a colourful, exciting world of diversity. His work is a eminent cry for love from a safe space behind the mirror. As a former classical dancer and performer in the entertainment world, he worked a lot on appearance and dynamics. By deconstructing formatted and idealized images, he looks for more intimate and visceral sensations including lack and desire. Daniel works in a hurry, torn between the moral brake of an adult and the unlimited fantasy of a wild child. He wants to preserve something unfinished in his work, completion would be the end of a dynamic. His subjects present themselves in an intimate moment with their strength, their vulnerability, their anguish, their fantasies, as hybrid creatures in a world between dream and reality. Confused between appearing and being, between different realities, he explores the boundaries between figuration and abstraction. He proceeds by first setting up a solid outline with pencil, felt, brush, he continues then with knife, rag, finger, white spirit to add decoration or erase, sometimes until destruction. Finally, beyond the realization, he looks for a simple connection, the beginning of a little story that comes out of the unsaid, a calming. Each work is framed in the same way, like a corset.