The Brooklyn Rail

When he passed away last year, Eyal Danieli left behind the drawings and paintings that would become his Late Works, on view at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery until April 6.

Danieli’s late work consists of grids and stripes, but they are not the kind that you might think: not the stable, peaceful lines of Agnes Martin, not the buoyant strips of Stanley Whitney. Despite the geometric turn, these are still unmistakably the work of Eyal Danieli, an artist known among artists for his unflinching expressions of contemporary barbarism. His touch was Gustonian, brutish, his intensity pitch-black. At times mournful, at times acerbic, he spent much of his life working in silhouette, having found an affinity for this mode’s capacity to be at once subversive and direct.

In the late work, he took the binary principle of the silhouette and opened it up: he let go of the direct references to oppression and atrocity that had long inhabited his work, and he came in the end to enact in execution the attitudes he once depicted. His colors include almost none but black, near-black, a sandy off-white, orange-vest orange, and a craggly red that calls to mind the dirty blood of a kid’s skinned knee. The stripes are made indelicately, less like the painter who places paint (Van Gogh, say) and more like the guy at the deli taking down an order. The work here is clear in image, yes, but filthy in fact—greasy, fleshy, chthonic. These pictures have the directness of a punch in the face, a clarity one feels less in the mind and more in the nerves. They are, in short, haunting.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1961, Danieli moved to Israel in his youth and served for a time in the Israel Defense Forces. When he came back to the United States, a fellow student in New York recalls seeing in him “the expression of someone who had seen war and been deeply traumatized by the experience.” He had by this time already made a painting of himself as a Nazi, and the sense he had of his own responsibility for the suffering of others never seems to have left him. Around 2010, he declared his ambition to make six million drawings of the Sieg Heil Nazi salute, transmuting a would-be memorial to the six million murdered Jews into the image of a call for ethnically motivated violence. He was suggesting, not subtly, that this is something the West already was doing.

The gesture of the Sieg Heil drawings must have been, consciously or not, a significant influence on his shift into the stripe paintings. After a decade of drawing the salute from life (he estimated, in 2022, that he had made close to a thousand, all with a raised-arm model present), the artist started to drag an oil stick, at first across, and then straight up, straight down his canvases. The similarity of this mechanical movement to the gesture of salute with which he had been for so long obsessed could not have been merely incidental. Like in the Nazi self-portrait of his youth, in the late paintings he embodied, now even more immediately, the oppressive character he sensed lay within. These paintings are less abstract than they are literal: records of a gesture, writing on the wall.

Danieli called the new paintings “stripes” even when the word did not seem to fit—they eventually became more grid than stripe—and I don’t think this was a mistake. Not only are stripes what soldiers earn, and what their flags have, and what predators have, and what prey have, but the word “stripe” is also (I can feel my heart beating) dangerously close to the word strip: a word in which there is a convergence of a Nazi command, ordered again and again in the concentration camps, and, yes, the name of a place Danieli may have helped to occupy while he was in the Israeli military, the Gaza Strip. His late work articulates the excruciating tension of the Shoah on the one hand and the Nakba on the other. The stripes gave him a way to engage what he could not unlearn, unsee, undo. His grid was his gridlock. Seeing this work now, a year after his death, and after so many others, feels equally like a gift and like a curse. If it is hard to take, it is even harder to look away. He gave us a dark image of a dark world, and then he left.