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Photographic Drawings
The Photographic Drawings series emerges from the observation of minute surfaces, where freshly deposited drops of ink become the starting point for sensitive landscapes. Echoing the Japanese practice of shodō (calligraphic gesture), each stroke is immediate, singular, and carries the fullness of the present moment.
These images activate a three-dimensional perception and transform the photographic plane into a space of presence. Between color, light, and shadow, organic and symbolic forms arise — evoking marine, celestial, or inner topographies. These are not landscapes to be seen, but rather felt.
A central element in these compositions is the space around the gesture — the negative space, the silence between forms. Rooted in Zen thought, where emptiness is not absence but potential, this void becomes a field of resonance. It is within this openness that the form finds its meaning, and where the viewer is invited to breathe and inhabit the image.
Photographic Drawings proposes a decelerated sense of time, where each work reveals the instant just before its disappearance — not as a loss, but as an offering. The space between things is not empty, but full of possibility.
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Mineral
In Mineral, Daniel Mattar composes ephemeral landscapes from pure pigment — raw matter that predates the act of painting itself. These fragments of earth, extracted and ground into colored powders, are laid directly onto white surfaces in ritualistic arrangements of color, density, and texture. It is from this primal substance that all color begins — activated by oil or water to become paint, language, and image.The photographed compositions reveal topographies of color: dense, unstable, and breathing. Each image becomes a suspended record of matter in transformation — evoking geological forms, sedimented histories, and planetary layers. This process embodies a tension between the solidity of the material and its inherent fragility.Mattar’s deep engagement with pigment is not only visual . Color here is not neutral; it is history, land, labor. Each tone and volume carries traces of extraction, exploitation, and ritual — from cobalt blues to earthen reds — invoking both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.This practice resonates with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of mandala-making, where colored sand is meticulously arranged in sacred geometries only to be released to the wind in a gesture of impermanence. Similarly, in Mineral, the act of composing with pigment is a meditation on transience — yet it is also an act of preservation. The photograph, through light and shadow, captures the composition in its exact moment of presence, suspending its dissolution and transforming what is fleeting into image and memory. -
Quadra
In Quadra, Daniel Mattar collects printed fragments from his daily life — discarded color charts, packaging, and mundane surfaces — remnants of the industrial and graphic language that quietly shape our visual environment. These materials, often overlooked or destined for the trash, are reclaimed and given new significance. Through this act of poetic recycling, what was once banal becomes a ground for transformation.
Upon these rational, coded surfaces — structured by grids, lines, and typographic logic — Mattar applies sculptural volumes of oil paint in intuitive gestures. The title Quadra (Portuguese for “block” or “quadrant”) refers to the geometry of the substrate, but also to its disruption: paint floods the system, destabilizing its order and introducing vitality, unpredictability, and material excess.
Once photographed in high detail, these painted surfaces transcend their origin. The macro lens reveals what the eye cannot grasp: chromatic landscapes that resemble oceans in motion, tectonic shifts, or abstract topographies. Through light and shadow, the photographic process suspends the gesture in a state of heightened presence.
Quadra is a negotiation between structure and eruption, between design and matter. It evokes not only a formal exploration of color and texture, but also a gesture of reparation — an ecological and symbolic gesture that reclaims and transforms the overlooked surfaces of contemporary life into sites of energy, imagination, and resistance.
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