Daniela
Montes

Born in Belgium in 1976, Daniela Montes is a Belgo-Spanish artist who graduated in drawing and painting at the Fine Arts Academy of Brussels. She recently settled with her family in the South of France, where she’s an artist in residence at the “Atelier des Artistes” in Sanary-sur-Mer. 
Daniela was introduced to art by her mother, being herself an artist, who took her to drawing classes at the age of 10. Over the last 15 years, she has been living and exhibiting in very contrasting countries like Belgium, India, Argentina, Gabon and France, and her works can be found in private collections in many other countries as well. 
Daniela has started with figurative painting and slowly moved towards abstraction, working in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture and serigraphy. With a studio at Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi from 2006 to 2009, she produced works under the guidance of the renowned Indian artist Rameshwar Broota, who helped her to internalise the new cultural context and negotiate a terrain that is simultaneously foreign and enabling, resulting in a series of abstract contemplative paintings and a series of small sized self-portraits that refer to the recurrent concern of the artist for the relentlessness of time.In 2009, she moved to Buenos Aires and experienced yet another buzzling cultural and artistic city life for 4 years. There, she participated in a workshop - lead by the Argentinian abstract painter Tulio de Sagastizábal in C.I.A., Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas – consisting of 20 selected artists that had to present their work and ideas in front of the group, generating a critical analysis and debate around concepts, as well as constructive discussions on artistic processes and intentions, confronting works and ideas. Daniela also attended seminars with visual artist Mónica Girón at Torcuato di Tella University. The main objective of these gatherings was to improve the participants’ understanding and judgement skills of artistic expressions in order to increase not only their creative potential but also to perceive and work with intuition. With the artist Mariela Scafati, she got initiated to screen printing and produced works on fabric and paper.From 2013 to 2017, Daniela worked in Libreville and was part of the collective and collaborative project of the Galerie Ephémère. Along with other artists and craftsmen, she participated in and set up group exhibitions, promoting local art and raising creative and artistic awareness. 
Even if the travels, the contrasting cultures and different environments may create a wide experience of life, Daniela always connects her lived experience and observations with the deep need of roots and her necessity to remain connected to nature. She gets inspired by familiar landscapes and surroundings and is interested in what is left or in what she remembers of a specific moment, which she strives to reduce to its essence. Her subjects therefore become abstract and simplified, the landscape is no longer large but zoomed in. In her latest “Fragmented” series, she is interested in mineral shapes that she approaches with a close up view, using only black acrylic on wood board, canvas or paper. Along with the use of brushes, she also uses common, domestic utensils ranging from kitchen sponges to knives and sandpaper. Layers of painting accumulate, then are scratched or washed away, to be covered by colour again. Different memories get mixed up, one feeling leading to the other, being superposed and becoming one but not only.