“The All-World trembles; the All-World trembles physically, geologically, mentally, spiritually, because the All- World is looking for the point—not the station, but the utopian point where all the world’s cultures, all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another without dispersing or losing themselves. And that, I think, is utopia, above all. Utopia is a reality where one can meet with the other without losing himself.” – Édouard Glissant (1)

Daniel Boyd was thinking of trembling when he made these four powerful paintings for the 2021 Auckland Art Fair. The large-scale images of erupting volcanoes and canoes cutting across rippling water invite us
to imagine what it is to be on an unstable surface and feel that movement through our bodies. Such a sensation would be familiar to the population of Aotearoa, surrounded by water, an archipelago straddling the seam of the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. But this sensation could also be shared by all the world’s population as we experience the cumulative destabilising effects of 2020/2021: pandemic, environmental disasters, political upheaval and cultural revolution.

Rather than focus on the fear and uncertainty of such instability, Boyd’s painting are aligned to the possibilities evoked by ‘trembling thinking’, as suggested by poet, author and philosopher Édouard Glissant. In this context, a trembling thought is one that refuses to be pinned down and rejects all categories of fixed and imperial thought. Instead, it allows for multiple outcomes and identities. The rejection of certainly is an intentional embrace of chaos, a strategy employed to resist the homogenising forces of globalisation, claiming the right to maintain difference and leveraging the power of opacity to withhold that which is sacred.

“In the chaos of the last year, I think, I’m most interested in holding on to difference. In that sense, there is beauty in chaos. I feel comfortable within that.” – Daniel Boyd (2)

Boyd’s unique pointillist technique both reveals and conceals information, creating layered visual ‘lenses’ of information within a field of unknowing. Questioning the notion of perceived knowledge, Boyd’s destabilisation of imagery and our perception of it leads us to an acknowledgment of the incomprehensible and the possibility of other narratives. The paintings themselves are in a sense unfixed, allowing the viewer multiple entry and exit points from which to engage with them over an infinite duration of space and time.

“I was always interested in trying to create a collective way of seeing. I was always interested in trying to create like a duality, where you had to acknowledge the Other, the unknown.” – Daniel Boyd (3)

1. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Chus Martinez and Bettina Funcke (eds.), ‘100 Notes – 100 Thoughts No038: Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist’, dOCUMENTA (13), 2011, pp. 5–6.
2. Maddee Clark, ‘In Progress: Daniel Boyd’, The Saturday Paper, 12 December 2020, p. 26.
3. Maddee Clark, ‘In Progress: Daniel Boyd’, The Saturday Paper, 12 December 2020, p. 26.