Metamorphosis as permanent state: challenging finitude through making and re-making

Milan-based curator and freelance journalist Eleonora Savorelli has met up with Jamaican-born painter Danny Anostia Avidan whose work she has admired for a very long time. "I need paint to be something you hold, that you can sink your fist into—like flesh, like earth, a living thing. The process of adding and subtracting, of having something appear and reworking it again and again" he says about his practice in a conversation between the two for C-print.

Danny Anostia Avidan, The Accursed Share (2025) oil, pigment pencil and collage on canvas, 80 x 100 cm, courtesy the artist

E.S: I would like to start our conversation asking you about your painting process: I am curious about how you approach a new canvas. You described your art-making process as “action based and visceral”—which I do not find hard to believe considering the powerful and ferocious lines that compose your paintings—can you elaborate on this aspect?

D.A.A: There’s nothing more beautiful and more terrifying than a new canvas.

I make my own frames so starting new works always happens after like three days of sawing and screwing and stretching and priming, and then suddenly I have a bunch of new pages all over my studio—white, clean, and full of potential. And it can be paralyzing. So, in order to move, I have to stain it straight away—to ruin it a bit—so the work becomes a correction rather than a spoiling. I like to start with some intention, some directionality, a sense of movement. I never work with sketches or preparatory drawings. I do some broad strokes to position the composition and go from there.

And those strokes tell me something—about where I am and where I can go—and I try to give that shape, and a character grows out of it. It spreads, tries to find its limbs and position. Then I correct it with the background. It’s like a tide between character and background—one eats away at the other and then recedes.

As this ebb and flow tries to find equilibrium, I try to maintain a sense of motion—not to let it settle too quickly, not to distort the whole process around one stain or color or stroke I’ve fallen in love with. I kill those things, let them sink into the background, fertilize the ground.

The whole process usually follows this pattern. Bursts of action and intuitive painting sprees, and then a slow, more methodical chipping away and refinement. I like having these two poles—losing myself a bit into these almost performative action-painting moments and then a covering up, a more deliberative cerebral process, sometimes with number 2 brushes to bring things together. It often happens that I think I know where the painting is going and I work at it, refining and polishing, for a couple of weeks or a month, only to then realize the entire premise is wrong. And if I erase what I thought the painting was about and let it become what it wants to be instead, it can suddenly be finished in a day. But this month of gestation was necessary to enable it.

Portrait of Danny Anostia Avidan, courtesy of the artist

E.S: Your academic background consists in mythology and comparative religion: how much do these fields have a place in your canvases? Are they pools of knowledge where you draw inspiration and characters, or there is more? Is it possible to trace the myth-drawn characters we see in your paintings to alter egos of yours who let your personal experience enter into the paintings?

D.A.A: I don’t have any formal education in religious studies. It’s just one of the most illuminating and productive subjects I’ve studied on my own—it has given me important ways to conceptualize what I’m doing as an artist. I think myth is the crystallized sediment of millennia of human psyche—one of the best places to go to understand it. Since art deals with symbols and archetypes, myth is like a refined narrative X-ray of the human condition. Each story and character are so intrinsically profound and universal because they’ve been polished and added to again and again. You see the same issues across cultures and times—the same fears, the same dreads, the same inability or unwillingness to accept the state of things. The same attempt to strike at the not-enoughness of the world—with the same tools: sex, violence, love, metamorphosis.

And when I tap into this well it helps me give shape to my own feelings, my own vague notions, my own process. Out of a sea of chaos and desires an image can emerge once I give it a name. It helps me focus. Know what I want to say. And know that it’s a path worth taking.

I was just working on a painting in the studio. It’s been going on and changing for months. And I had to change something in it for the composition today, and suddenly it reminded me of a figure jumping over a flame. And I remembered there’s a saint who was unburned. So, I went and reread that. A story about Agnes of Rome who was put to the stake but the fire refused to burn her so the executioner stabbed her instead. This is told like some miracle. And I love this image. This pseudo escape form death—she jumps over the flames only to be pierced by the sword. And it resonates with a bunch of stuff I’m thinking about.

About the desperate attempt to pretend like we can escape mortality. About violence. About grace the face of it. Point being—the combination of the unconscious, somewhat random process of painting, and the conscious post-facto interpretation of the thing, can be a very surprising and powerful tool of self-revelation. It’s magic. It’s like therapy.

All that being said, it’s important to remember that at the end of the day I’m a painter. The work isn’t about Agnes or Thebes or Shiva or whatever—it’s about this color next to that one, the balance of the composition, and the traces of subjectivity that made it—something the viewer, through empathy and attention, can inhabit. Myth is just a framing device, a way to aid in that empathic work.

Danny Anostia Avidan, Rahu (2019), ceramics, 50 x 70 cm, courtesy the artist

E.S: Mythology is for sure one of your main sources of inspiration for your paintings. What about your primary inspirations in terms of literature, poetry, and music? Which are the pieces of art that truly resonated with you, and stayed with you during your artistic and human journeys?

D.A.A: Most importantly—I look at painting constantly. I live in the middle of the forest, so it’s almost always online—but you take what you get. I’m not that picky with painting; I almost always find something to love or admire or learn from.

I look at everything—Magdalenian cave paintings, Etruscan frescoes, Japanese Shunga prints, Giotto, Chola bronzes, Twombly, and Guston. And there are many contemporary painters I love too—lately I’ve been looking a lot at Ambera Wellmann and Maria Pratts.

But as a painter, painting is tainted by jealousy and greed and thievery for me. It’s vital and prodding but also unsettling; it induces hunger. When I need nourishment, I turn more to poetry, music, and dance.

I had a strange year—anxious and distracted like everyone—and I needed hope, something to rekindle excitement about the species, about this whole cultural edifice. So I went to works that forced transcendence down my throat. In poetry, that means grand things: Wallace Stevens with his acrobatic English so rich in virtuosity and imagery it weighs the page down; Whitman, the paragon of humanism and life-affirmation; Pound, who makes the entire history of Eurasia into a weird autobiography that has a rhythm you can almost dance to.

Speaking of dance—I’m really not educated and know very little but I’ve been watching pieces of classical and contemporary ballet and, despite the well-known problems with it, I find it so hopeful. So…. anti-barbaric? This level of rigor and excellence and exactitude and form and sheer cultural aesthetic delight, it’s so highly refined and so anti-anti-elite and this pursuit feels so against the zeitgeist and, as I said, hopeful.

It goes for music as well. Been listening to a lot of Baroque—especially harpsichord—because of its constraints I feel like the structure had to be more rigorous and it’s just crazy. It’s like listening to metal music.

In writing—I think the person who had the most influence on me is Bataille. His thoughts about death, sexuality, and excess resonate so well and speak to how I see the world. I took a lot from The Accursed Share and Erotism. I love how he starts from these dubious but profound biological insights and extrapolates from them the whole human condition—it’s gorgeous. Another writer I love is Roberto Calasso—his retelling of Greek and Hindu myths is a masterpiece and really got me into them.

As for prose—I love Roberto Bolaño. I’ve read 2666 about five times now, and each time it feels more profound, mysterious, and exhilarating. The sense that the world is some esoteric riddle that not even God knows the answer to, spinning around a black hole that everything is dragged toward—and that fourth book, which is just a 300-page punch to the stomach. It’s funny and horrible and weird and profound.

Danny Anostia Avidan, In The Worldbreath All Is Wave (2025), oil and pencil on canvas, 200 x 180 cm, courtesy the artist

E.S: The concept of “trying to overcome finitude” has accompanied you through all your artistic career as your main goal and ambition: where this idea and need come from? Do you try to reach this aim via the making and re-making of your canvases—which is a dominant aspect of your painting process—or it has more to do with the picture that will emerge in time from your ever-growing body of paintings?

D.A.A: This need, this wish, this thing of trying to overcome finitude, I just think it’s the basic fact of the human condition. I think being alive is definitionally being separate and therefore finite.

One of my favorite things is watching microscopy videos. You can see it there—out of the blind laws of chemistry forms a membrane, a border, a separation between in and out. That’s life. That’s all it is. A maintaining of that separation by riding entropy, by an economy of opening and closing. And everything that comes after is just extrapolation. Just larger but basically the same. So, we are separate, and separate means finite—and that’s terrifying. So, we try to extend ourselves into the other: into a lover, into God, into art. But being alive, being a subject, being a “you,” means being separate. So, this wish for more always entails the dissolution of the self. There’s this tension—wanting to be separate to remain a self, and wanting to be non-finite, which means not separate.

Art strikes at that. It’s always an extending—not only to make the impermanent permanent, like Butades’ daughter drawing her lover’s shadow, but more like a shaman. The shaman’s job is to “die,” to go beyond, become non-finite, and then come back to show the way—to take you by the hand and tell you it’s going to be okay. So, you can partake in this infinity while being finite. So, you can see Zeus in all his glory without getting burned. The shaman studies for years. Learns the songs and the stories, repeats the dance moves, goes to isolate and contemplate in the forest, and then, once initiated, they can die and come back for you. Death, the abyss, transcendence—you have a guide who will walk with you. And that’s what we do in a way.

Now, how I see it, there’s no “beyond.” But there is the chasm between us and the world and in it there’s all our fears and desires and mystery. Sitting in the studio all day, staring that in the face—being bored, crazy, passionate, angry—you go to those places. And then you come back. You try to give shape to shapelessness, to make the personal universal by way of the mythical. And by giving it shape others can partake in it. Can inhabit these places with you. We can build an empathic bridge between two separate subjects.

And that’s a way of overcoming finitude—or a way of failing at it but having that failure be meaningful. And I know how grandiose this all sounds. At the end of the day, I spend my time alone in a room smearing dirt on fabric, doodling faces, making living room decorations. It’s a weird, silly activity—but it’s also digging into the core of the human condition, the only way I know to think productively about what it means to exist. It’s both those things.

E.S: In your paintings, the chaos prevails—or, at least, what can be perceived as such, with all the swirling and tumultuous brushstrokes. Sometime, in this vibrant environment more definite pictures arise: they can appear as more well-defined details, sometime a face, just a gaze or a mouth; or as drawings in little sheets of paper attached to the painting’s surface. How do these aspects co-exist in the canvas? How should they be interpreted?

D.A.A: That’s a hard question. Sometimes I feel that if I were only braver or more confident, I’d allow myself to lose the mooring of the figure. But I find I need it—like an anchor. I think of it in terms of the tension between form and formlessness, being bordered and losing the border. Like we said before—an economy of opening and closing. Where’s the place where we can be both? Maybe it’s also an empathetic doorway—a hook for the gaze. It’s not something I decide. I just find myself returning to the figure again and again. When I lose it, when I give in to the formal dance of stains and smears and strokes, I love the energy, but I haven’t yet found a way to find myself in it. It feels lacking. And when it’s too figurative, too “done,” it feels dead, kitsch. I’m always trying to push against that tension.

E.S: Looking at the progression of your artworks—from the body of works exhibited at your solo show The Tragedy of Acis and Galatea in 2022 at Tube Culture Hall, Milan, to the paintings exhibited at the bi-personal show Evanescentia in 2025 at Escat Gallery, Barcelona—one cannot help but notice the changes that have occurred in your works in the last years. For instance, the human figure is still drawn with an exuberant trait, but now it has acquired a more heroic and tragic standing, and unsettling gaze, while the previous beings expressed a more archaic and mysterious aura. The colors shifted from being “round,” with pastel and brown-reddish tones, to “loud” pink, red, fuchsia, and occasionally bright blue. What pushed you to these choices?

Danny Anostia Avidan, The Death of Acis (2024), oil, charcoal, pencil and pigment on canvas, 209 x 165 cm, courtesy the artist

D.A.A: You know, you find a thread to pull on it, and you follow, it’s not a conscience journey. You try to see what the paintings tell you and what your abilities and inabilities permit and where you can get to with who you are at the time. I don’t know that this path will continue forward. It might circle back and go the other way.

But the honest answer is very prosaic. I felt a bit anachronistic—with my Greek myths and muted colors—and one day I stumbled on a tube of that fuchsia in an art shop, and it felt like a solution. I use a lot of ochre pigments that I mix myself—locally sourced browns, reds, and blacks that come as powders with geo-certificates and organic sourcing or whatever—and this pink felt less old, but also weird, alive, slightly sexy and violent. That’s the thing, though—it’s such a stupid activity sometimes. A mundane feeling of needing more color and finding the right shade on sale at the right time. But then it builds the entire tension of the painting in it. And building the painting you create and you discover yourself. Not that there weren’t other selves to discover in the ochers, but this specific self I could only create and meet in that fuchsia. It’s crazy, but it actually works. I’m always astonished by it.

E.S: In terms of development of your artistic path, I would like you to tell me how you shifted from sculpture to painting: was it a need, or it started as an experimentation? Do you think the way you used to sculpt influenced somehow the way you started painting, or are they two completely separate fields?

D.A.A: I was living in Berlin, and my studio was way out east, in the middle of nowhere. I was making clay reliefs and dragging them across town to the only kiln big enough. Half would break on the way. It was a nightmare. That whole period wasn’t great. I was working every day at a brass foundry, breaking old molds and cleaning up fresh casts—dirty, miserable work. I felt dead in it, and in Berlin. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and moved back to Italy, where I’d lived before. I rented a little country house with a studio not far from the sea, and then the pandemic started. I was alone and had the chance to reinvent myself.

I’d always been slightly intimidated by painting—my ex-wife was a classically trained painter, and while we worked side by side, painting was her thing. But now I was alone, and I needed size, color, and I was tired of fragility and dust and the zen practice of letting 50% of my work break. But sculpture stayed with me—first of all, the materiality. I can’t live without that in painting. There are so many paintings I love online, and then in real life I’m disappointed. They have no mass, no life in the color, no history. I need paint to be something you hold, that you can sink your fist into—like flesh, like earth, a living thing. The process of adding and subtracting, of having something appear and reworking it again and again, is very similar to how I worked with clay. That stayed. Also, the compositions—the single isolated character, the clear difference between object and world. I don’t know if that’s “sculptural,” but it was for me.

And there’s still this letting go. I almost need to have dead paintings underneath my works. No matter how much I plan, I always end up with a painting two centimeters thick because I’ve covered it so many times. I love the image of a mound—like an archaeological tell or a burial ground. A city built on a hill made by its own past. Or a gravestone summing up a whole life. That approach—the willingness to destroy what you’ve worked on for months—I learned that from sculpture. But in paint, it’s different, because it stays. It accumulates. Nothing is really gone. It scars.

E.S: I would like to ask you about the projects you are working on at the moment? Is there anything you are willing to share?

D.A.A: I’ve been working on a show I’ll have soon in Italy—it’s in its final stages. It’s going to be called Landscape with a Man Bitten by a Snake, after the Poussin painting. Like that painting, it’ll have this unspeakable terror at its center—everything sucked into it while trying to escape. The show revolves around what we’ve been talking about—this desperate attempt to resist finitude, to be reborn away from it through passion, through metamorphosis.

There’s an image that’s been with me for a while—people undressing, which reminds me of shedding skin: Marsyas or Saint Bartholomew, or Hercules ripping his shirt and skin off in pain—all being transformed into something new, leaving behind this residue, this trace, this membrane—which is the shirt, the skin, or, which is the point, the painting. So that’s one image. And it’s in conversation with the snake, who also sheds its skin and is both reborn and an agent of passion. There are also some demons eating the moon from Hindu mythology. And… all kinds of stuff. A lot of that fuchsia. It’s going to be a very pink show.

/Eleonora Savorelli

Eleonora Savorelli is an independent curator and freelance journalist based in Milan. After graduating from John Cabot University, Rome, with a Bachelor's Degree in Art History with Minors in Entrepreneurship and Classical Studies, she attended the two-year Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies program at Naba, Milan.

She currently works in the Milanese contemporary art gallery BUILDING, where she is in charge of exhibition coordination. At the same time, she writes for a variety of online publications, including ArteIN and Kabul Magazine. This is her second feature for C-print Journal.