Daniel Canogar

Born in Madrid, Spain 1964, Daniel Canogar specializes in the fusion of digital media with collage. His works feature the fusing or binding of man and machine, the replication of body parts which are patterned in a way so that it creates another form or figure, or the manipulation of LED light installations to effect a highly illuminated performance. He first earned his degree in photography from NYU and the International Center for Photography in 1990. He then moved to exhibiting works in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Andy Warhol Museum as well as creating other installations in Barcelona, Berlin, New York, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Today he is currently working in video, photography, sculpture, and installation and he continues to exhibit his work in various museums and exhibitions such as his work titled Constelaciones which is the largest photo-mosaic in Europe, originally created for two pedestrian bridges in Manzanares River Park, Madrid.

One work in particular proved most intriguing. It was his piece titled Enredos created in 2008.

This piece was perhaps one of the most intricate and perplex works that I have ever seen in the sense that it is hard to understand how he accomplished this, though mostly likely through digital medium. It looks so realistic that it fools the eye and the mind of the observer into thinking that this is an extraordinarily intricate installation that requires daring and patient participants. What this work seems to communicate at least to me, is the interconnection and sometimes entanglement of lives to one another. We are all somehow connected whether it is through blood or ancestory or history. Or it is just simply by knowing a guy who knows a guy who knows who knows guy and so on and so forth. The message also proves to be dark in some aspects. The bodies in this piece look lifeless--almost helpless. As if they were all lifeless corpses or forms frozen in time, hindered from performing their everyday routines. As a whole, this could represent a time-based piece that focuses, stops, and zooms in on how we are all performing daily routines in this working world and how we are all just apart of cluster--like a cluster of worker ants who continuously and monotonously perform the same function everyday. This piece could also represent how we are entangled and trapped by the wires of technology. I say this because the strings binding the figures to one another also look like wires. This may represent how we all live and are, in some ways, controlled by the digital age. The majority of things we do now are done on computers or handhelds or on the internet. We don't notice it because we've become apart of it and it has become apart of us. In short, we who have formulated technology are now controlled by it or that we are piece of its workings.
 To comment on the aesthetic quality of the work, I'd say that it is nothing short of brilliant. It is chaotic but organized and looks like it took a great amount of thought to piece it together. I would however change the background of the piece. I'm not quite sure if he meant to have a black background but something about it makes it looks as if the figures are floating in space or a negative void. If perhaps, it was gray or white, it would look more like an installation or digital piece that holds less of an emptiness to it. Yet what makes this piece strong is the fact that the foreground has bursts of color and it is bright and loud which juxtaposes its dark, empty, and seemingly quiet background. I believe that's what makes it 3-D and allows the piece to transcend from it digitally manipulated form and fool the observer into thinking that is a real-live installation (or at least of a photograph of a real-life installation). Alongside his other works, I also see this pattern of illusion. An example would be his Horror Vacui created in 1999 that features hundreds of what looks to be dismembered hands all clustered together. This pattern of clustering and illusion seems to evoke fear and intrigue for the observer which is not something I've seen in other artists before. It's unique and Canogar is definitely an artist whose works I'd like to see more of and be inspired by.

http://www.danielcanogar.com/daniel-canogar.php?l=en
His performance piece, Dial M for Murder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Yo7A5eTPk