Daniel Enkaoua

After years in France and Israel, Daniel Enkaoua lives with his family in Barcelona. He paints there and finds his motifs on his doorstep in the barren mountain landscapes of Catalonia, in his sons and his daughter Aure, his wife Sarah, whom he has been portraying for years, and in small everyday household objects such as cooking pots, chairs, fruit and vegetables.
"Swiss chard and leeks" - these vegetables, which at first glance seem banal, take on a strong presence in Enkaoua's picture. It is not a snapshot, captured on the way from the market to the cooking pot. Chard and leek are portrayed, given their own dignity in their ordinariness, brought out of obscurity into the light. The strong, bright colours and the size of the picture underline the aesthetic quality of the work: it is more a portrait than a still life - and by no means a nature morte, as still life is called in France: dead nature.
Enkaoua's paintings transcend their motifs and tell of reality, of reality beyond the image - and even more of the deep truth that underlies everything: "Art, then, as thanksgiving, and painting as one of the most effective means of bringing to light the comprehensive, condensed content of secrets, meaning and beauty that the smallest fragment of reality can contain." (Àlex Susanna: Daniel Enkaoua at Montserrat, in: Museu de Montserrat (ed.): Muntanya Humana - Daniel Enkaoua, 2016, no p.) Wilfried Köpke