“There is an intentionality and playfulness in this balance that permits an array of doublings to occur: Double entendres, double vision, double texture, double sound, double thought, double pleasure. The paintings, however, go beyond just doubling.”


When looking at Linda Daniels’ paintings, the word phosphorescence comes to mind. There’s a palpable glow that expands the atmosphere of her work onto a pliable plane. Despite their systematic structure, Daniels’ paintings are fluid and exploratory, opening up a dialogue between perception and location. The viewer is introduced to her work as both a tangible thing and an idea. The crisp, geometrically aligned shapes filled with vibrant, seductive hues confront us with the physicality of her work. The different sizings and variations of these shapes, along with the range of colors she employs, present us with a flexibility that grounds her work in an ever-changing web of interpretation. These perceptual nuances that Daniels plays with generate a multimodal movement. The paintings move and so do we. As we navigate our way through this expansive network of meaning, color, shape, and scale, the paintings shape-shift and compliment our own movement with their own. Like a dance partner, Daniels’ work encourages us to take hold of it intuitively and mindfully, emphasizing the subtleties of distance, bodily adjustment, and rhythm. We become immersed in an experience unmediated by external baggage and are carried into the depths of our own perception. What surfaces is a newfound awareness of our coordinates along time and space.

In the series of paintings selected for “Double Double”, Daniels is literally and figuratively doubling the stakes. These paintings are less ornate compared to some of her previous work. This choice marks her continuation of a career-long conversation between the tenants of formal abstraction and the decorative elements in painting. The decorative aspects of her paintings—color and curves—are shown in equal proportion to the formal aspects—structure and scale. Yet, decoration and formalism are not separate entities in this series. Rather, they interact fluidly. There is an intentionality and playfulness in this balance that permits an array of doublings to occur: Double entendres, double vision, double texture, double sound, double thought, double pleasure. The paintings, however, go beyond just doubling. They reach into a realm of innumerable meanings where nothing is absolute. They weave multiple strands of perception together, inviting a sense of openness that allows the viewer to be a more active participant.

By exhibiting Daniels’ series “Double Double” at FiveCarGarage, we hope to be adding another layer of complexity to the experience of it. The gallery, set amongst Santa Monica’s airy, oceanic light, has inherited the conditions that inspired the Light and Space artists. The unique and historically-marked atmosphere of FiveCarGarage will perhaps evoke another layer of dialogue with Daniels’ work—doubling up, so to speak, on our interactions with her paintings and the meanings produced.

Linda Daniels has been a painter for over four decades. She was born in 1954 and spent most of her childhood and early adult life in California. In 1984, she moved to New York City where she lived and made artwork for thirty years. She had six solo exhibitions in New York City, and in 1991 she received a Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts. She moved back to the central coast of California in 2014, and had a solo exhibition in Los Osos, California in 2022. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum International, Arts Magazine, Art in America, and The Brooklyn Rail. The paintings in “Double Double” were made over the last seven years, this is her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. She is currently living and making artwork in Lompoc, California.







_{Written by Gawain Semlear}