Daniel Hanequand Commentary

The Drawers - Daniel Hanequand Commentary written by Julie Oakes

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When Daniel Hanequand has thrown out the old and created a new sociological with the swagger of a true French revolutionist. He has upturned existing, stuck and rather boring functional ways and invented a different breed of humanoid and then placed the beings relationships and a context of his own making. When Paul Klee abstracted the figure, he turned from depiction, sorted the elements through cubism and then dove into the signification of abstraction and geometry. Hanequand distorts the figure from the inside to the outside so that the blur between the exterior and interior is more prominent. He is a 'curvist' rather than a cubist, softening the fractured space and creating a world view that is more akin to poetry than documentation. There is an abounding lyricism in his work - a lot of kissing going on. The figures seem entirely self absorbed and unthreatening, a little too bulbous to pose a serious opposition, their comings and goings relating to a sense of anti-gravitational play where speed is second nature, the result of uninhibited action. They are moving with internal combustion and the energy waves multiply within them, in ever changing and mutating swirls. They are ethereal, unconcerned with spatial definition but exchanging musculature, fluids and wind with each other. Twirling and cavorting on stages or in frames where their innocent coupling and orgiastic naïveté is exposed, they cavort with perfect guile, so preoccupied are they with their own imaginings. They have arrived, inhabited our consciousness and left an indelible imprint.

The colors, monochromatic schematics or playground lightness enhance the dancing convolutions. There is a blending of body to body like the launch and receive of ballet. There is also a psychedelic inference, a peculiar pop memory of Sargent Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band and the 'blue meanies'. Hanequand conjures all that is fantastic from science fiction, with trends towards proboscises, feelers, anthropomorphism, and surrealistic truncations.

They're miniatures, endearing strange little beings. This is a world under cover of unassuming smallness. It is completely self generating, falling in love, procreating and inspiring attention. Exquisitely rendered (many sharpened pencils) with an elliptical naturalism, the beings have taken over and left Daniel Hanequand slightly bewildered and bemused that they are so independently sure of themselves once weaned from his careful upbringing.