From Lee Carter and Annikka Olsen’s article “Meet 6 Rising Talents From the Inaugural Photofairs New York, From a Digital Dynamo Wielding A.R. to a Space-Bound Romantic” for artnet News:
Honduran-born, New York City-based artist Daniel Handal’s photography project “Engaños,” meaning “deceptions” or “illusions” in Spanish, takes inspiration from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel Against the Grain and its exploration of individuality and truth. Works from this project present an unexpected compositional juxtaposition: beautiful, carefully arranged floral bouquets in simple corrugated boxes. As photographs, they push the medium to its representational limit through their carefully deployed use of trompe l’oeil and other visual tricks. The images are near hyperclear, and mounted on painted museum boxes to further convey a sense of real space and depth, Handal’s work makes it difficult to tell at first glance whether it is an image or an object (or both).
With the aim of disrupting ideas around beauty and engaging with digital-era concerns around perception and reality, Handal leverages the extremes of photographic mechanical reproduction to create this equally stunning and unsettling series.
View Daniel Handal’s series “Engaños” at CLAMP.
Browse all work by Daniel Handal at CLAMP.