Since the 80’s, Dan Witz is famous all over the world for his well-known participation in the Street Art Movement, and also for his oil paintings that look like classical ones at first glance. The artist depicts a wild and fascinating world on which he swoops down like a bird of prey. Between presence and absence, filling ups and upstroke, the figurative artwork of Dan Witz, born in 1957, deal endlessly with human being.

A pair of female legs stuck on road signs, a pair of stuffed gloves that simulates a presence in a manhole… His aim is to humanize the street, to filter a bit of human heat in it. As a proof of this, a small hooded faceless character appears all the time and symbolizes his trademark. It’s no more and no less than a ghostly presence that characterizes all the artwork of Dan Witz, whether it is on the street or in galleries, whether indoors or outside.

These visions that swing between public and intimate always deal with human or artificial warmth, which make hover a kind of mystery that we find in his work in studios.

On one hand, his oil paintings, apparently classical and realistic, offer to us a quiet and warm vision of the suburb where night scenes and improvised low-key succeed one another: windows of shops and fronts of enlightened houses, or once again lamps that diffuse their warm lighting on bed heads and pedestal tables. But weather it is indoor or outdoor visions, each living soul seems to be extracted from it.

His series of “Mosh Pit” characterizes this notion, even diffusing a sensation of dizziness. He shows bunches of insane, dehumanized, alienated people or animals, as if they were raised as batteries. Order belongs to chaos, as a reference to the punk hardcore and its choreography, where violence is ritualized.
Orgies, riots, crowds of dogs, of rats packed together… These flesh heaps, opaque and murky, make us oscillate between attraction and repulsion: to fit in with this abstract mass or to remain a simple observer… One can’t help feeling uncomfortable in the presence of these dark beings without soul.

It is at ADDICT Galerie in Paris, that the recent “Mosh Pit” Series will be exhibited as Dan Witz’s first solo exhibition.