RECENT PAINTINGS BY DAN MAFE
A revolution has taken place in Daniel Mafe’s work of recent years. His highly controlled abstractions of the 1990s, with their veiled geometric structures, conjured discussion of digital screens and pixilated information. They captured a static light—mediated, muted and persistent in its glow, like an atomic after-image or an evocation of spirituality.1 Since 2006 the tensions inherent in the restraint of technique and optical vibration have been unleashed—into colour, gesture, drip and splatter. These expressive qualities have increased steadily in Mafe’s work. The paintings remain abstract, but the shift in expressive force and painterliness is vehement, fundamental, and driven by something other than the cerebral concerns of the earlier work he created after moving back to Australia from the United Kingdom in 1990. Emotion is highly resonant and titles, too, have become a little more expressive, in another shift from impersonal to personal (although Untitled still features heavily amongst the recent works there is also The Rose of My Desire, an invitation to intimacy not seen prior to 2006).
While Mafe’s metamorphosis has taken place over the same period as his work toward a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) and, in his view, the combination of articulation (in words and theory) and raw emotion, ‘joined it up very well’,2 this opportunity for self-analysis does not, by itself, seem sufficient for the explosive change. His thesis examined four bodies of work produced from 2004 to the present, and was based around an enquiry into what he described as the ‘generative affect’ in each.3
Three of these bodies of work are the paintings under discussion (which Mafe divides into the geometric work of 2004–2005, the work which incorporated cartoon-like... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Rose of My Desire VII, 2009. 180 x 300cm. Courtesy the artist and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane.
Untitled, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 120cm. Courtesy the artist and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane.
