In one sense, Martin Daiber’s works are about temporal and spatial recordings of an imagined experience. Just like the Analytic Cubists, who recorded a work of art at various angles, or even the Modernists who painted the same subject at various times of day to record changes in the light, Daiber’s works continuously shift their point of view and the painter’s aspect in relation to the image to create an image that appears to be in a shifting state. They maintain a type of Shakespearean theatricality, through their playful and tragicomic nature that appear almost plucked from set-design. His sculptural work, in which the manifold perspectives of the paintings become rendered in three-dimensions, add to the comical, Cubist nature of the work.
For Daiber, the works are about the gesture, where spontaneity leads his decision-making process, and the discovery of the painted surface that eventually develops into the final image. In that sense, they are like Still Lifes, continuously constructed through paint and imagination. The final image, which he refers to as a “Floating Image” is imagined, intangible, and gains substance as he works. He states: “The uncertainty or rather the desire of ‘finding something’ is the driving force”, playing through uncertainty and chaos to compose an image, much like a composer leads an orchestra to crescendo, or the director instructs the players upon the stage toward a storyline.
