Dani Michael Rosenberg: Hi, I was here and thought of you

In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious,” a young man is described as having acquired, after falling from a horse, a perfect memory: he remembers every detail of everything he has experienced in his life, even the shape of the clouds at every moment. Yet he is incapable of thinking, generalizing, or abstracting.

Danny Michael Rosenberg (born 1973, Holon) wonders what visual stories are and how they relate to reality. He weaves them onto an invisible thread while simultaneously tearing that thread apart, as images—like pearls scattered from a broken necklace—tumble down the stairs. What is their inner logic? he wonders. What is their memory, and what do they conceal behind them?

In his first solo museum exhibition, Rosenberg presents three series of paintings—The Red Thread, Hide-and-Seek, and Hello, I Was Here and Thought of You—created in parallel and successively, in ink and watercolor on paper. Through their stubborn accumulation, the images in these series form the temporal gaps between childhood and adulthood, withdrawal and longing, innocence and violence. They create a sense of closeness and familiarity while simultaneously arousing unease and disturbing the calm.

The intellectual and emotional foundation of Rosenberg’s visual process—the very act of painting—is embodied in collecting, cutting, and assembling. Cutting, as an act of fate, ultimately takes the form of wonders that evoke what has been excluded and disappeared. Words and images are pushed into the drawers of passing time, like an inheritance retrieved from them differently each time.

The Hide-and-Seek series includes works centered on objects, places, or events whose relationships appear arbitrary: a porcelain angel doll; a view of the ruins of Mussolini’s villa in Rhodes; a memory of a childhood friend’s palm painted in red acrylic; remnants of a seventeenth birthday party; a moment in a game of hide-and-seek when a child hides beneath a cover resembling a shroud; a model of Mainz Cathedral appearing in David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man; and a photograph of Rosenberg’s grandmother as a child, with a friend’s family, on a beach in another country.

The accumulation of these images unfolds a range of possible histories, repeatedly overlapping and fragmenting with every gaze that wonders about the retrospective perception of fate.

The term Der Rote Faden (“The Red Thread”) was used in German literature as a critical concept based on the need for narrative coherence and continuity—personal and collective—in a world characterized by fragmentation, chaos, and illogic. The Red Thread series, the oldest and most personal of the three, presents a family album of gazes in states of withdrawal and intimacy that capture feelings of time and pain and love within reality.

The series Hello, I Was Here and Thought of You, which gives the exhibition its title, focuses on the technique of trompe l’œil—a French term for a painting technique that creates a realistic illusion. Rosenberg responds to this tradition by creating images within images, in which pictures are combined with words against a wooden background. Within the conscious spaces he creates, he connects textual passages from well-known literary works—such as texts by Thomas Wolfe, addressing passing time and seemingly marginal yet meaningful prosaic moments; texts by Natalia Ginzburg, dealing with war, destruction, and loss; and texts by Bruno Schulz, who reflects on the deceptions of time and the wondrous manifestations of the violence of existence—or daily notes addressed to the artist with children’s drawings, quotations from art history—Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and John Currin—and drawings of household objects. The viewer’s eye moves between times and scenes, reconstructing its path.

Traces of people, objects, memories, and events float through the exhibition as images that accumulate, intertwine, and pursue one another. Together, they weave a path of passion and nostalgia for the act of representation while simultaneously pointing to its impossibility and failure. Through their abundance, these images embody painting as a life’s craft and an act of survival.