Daniel M.E. Schaal

Daniel M.E. Schaal’s diverse body of work seamlessly spans painting, printmaking, weaving, and performance, often elevated by his masterful integration of discarded packaging, cardboard, and textiles.
Driven by a fascination with the hidden narratives of the "thrown away," he transforms these inanimate objects into abstract settings and living structures. A defining component of his artistic practice is the act of repetition—a strategy of iteration evident in his weaving, painting, and printmaking that makes the viewer feel as though he is operating within the framework of a highly controlled, self-defined system.

In his evocative series The Memory of Things, Schaal weaves his own biography into the project by utilizing an old personal scarf as a matrix, merging textile work and graphics across three interconnected sub-series: The Read, The Search, and The Trapped.
In The Read, Schaal presents this scarf as the project's main protagonist, much like enlisting characters in a theatre play, rendering the object as a haunting negative that transforms into a delicate, ghost-like white veil printed against a rich, black "sculptural space" on Somerset White Satin paper to fulfill its full performative potential.
For The Search, a series of ten vibrant monotypes, the artist attempts to reconstruct the elusive emotional atmosphere and exact colors of his past while acknowledging that memory spontaneously shifts over time. This tension unfolds across poetic black and blue hues—ranging from greenish turquoise to deep mixes of ultramarine and purple—where glimpses of light emerge at the intersections of vertical and horizontal lines to expose the pure white of the paper beneath.
Finally, in the soft ground etchings of The Trapped, Schaal imprints the soft texture of the same scarf directly into copper plates to form entirely new, intricate patterns. By utilizing multi-layered superimpositions and printing one etched plate over another, Schaal emphasizes a profound process of becoming, capturing the transition between past and present to bring long-forgotten traces, memories, and physical sensations briefly back to the surface.