In her recent photo-based paintings InSide / NoSide, Daniela Papadia  creates a utopian gathering of the Family Of Men who move together from every remote site on earth. She invites people – with their cultures, rituals and daily behaviours – to join in at a gathering around a table in the desert, in an virgin no-place, where she envisages an existence of mutual, positive creativity, leveraging on the present energy and looking towards the future.
But the artist’s idealistic and prophetic messages do not linger in the poetic domain of emotional, abstracted language. Quite the opposite, in fact, since here work is radically rooted in concepts and innovations that are typical of contemporary times. In her search for  a common denominating factor for all human beings, both in physical and character terms, she approached and adapted into her art language the transcription code of the human Genoma, the DNA chain.
The chain thus appears in her work as a graph, or a musical score, or as an annotation of the electric cephalogram. Beautiful in its scientific look and presentation, the human Genoma graph becomes an icon of our time which Daniela Papadia uses as a major iterative, crucial component of her painting cycle InSide / NoSide. It crosses her photo based paintings horizontally. It becomes a superimposed landscape on the mostly desert-like environment, where she assembled  different ‘tribes’ from close and remote contemporary cultures for a celebration of togetherness: a chorus from a sweet Hollywood musical is overlooking  lines of praying Muslims, while Chinese leaders on a motorcycle drive past an Indian guru; a group of North African dancers, dressed in festive traditional clothing, are performing near a line of Chinese students, while a group of Manchurian peasants women are awaiting near their huge baskets for Godo to arrive… Hundreds of images are covering her canvases. It’s a world party of hopes, it’s an answer to recent situations of risks and injustice. And the Gnoma graphs are running all over: on rivers, and hills, and dunes. It stands for the belief in development and scientific inventions, while still keeping beauty in high value so that views are never distorted. In an interview, Daniela said: “Plotinius wrote that beauty is the splendour of truth. And the truth is none other than consciousness, assuming 0ne’s own destiny and responsibility for the future.” And in relation to her paintings cycle ‘Suspended’ ,where female figures are floating outside the gravitation powers of the earth, she noted: ‘Perhaps mankind needs to accept the fragility of existence, dangling by a thread in order to gradually change its image and once again inhabit the earth. If you fly without roots, it is quite likely that you will crash’.
Daniela’s interest in the destiny of the weak and in social and political justice was expressed in some of her work, from Profughi d’Identità (from 1994) till Save My Name (2005-6), as well as in the recent cycle Inside /Noside. The multicultural human society in our era of Displacement, where people and their culture are moving from the South to the North and from the East to the West, is the central theme of her art. And women’s destiny in our time is the theme of her dramatic and sensitive works entitled Inside Me (2005).
The integration of the painting language with scientific graphic codes in the recently exhibited series InSide/NoSide represents a shift in Daniela’s harvest, but her use of photographs as her point of departure is an integral to her work in the last five years. The photographic images she uses are taken from media sources: newspapers, magazines, television. They are witnesses testimonies of our time, of daily events of which they catch a second in the stream of time, like diaries.
This concept characterises contemporary art mainly from the 60’s. It shifted the discussion of art from the dominance of abstraction to real life itself, and we know that any relevant art is a witness its time, place and society within which it was created. So was the case with the very influential works by Andy Warhol from 1963, photo-based prints and painting that became the diaries of their times and society, like the Alabama race riots, the Electric Chair and the car crash series. Daniela’s works are as a collage of events, people, emotions, and ideals. Their images are with us, are part of us, and enrich us.

Amnon Barzel