'Freak' as a pretext
While they sing and hum, some in half language, they all move with spastic contortions, "we accept you, you are one of us, gooba-gobble, gooba-gobble!". A little boy walks through the table and gives them to drink from a huge cup, acting as a profane communion. The bearded woman, the Siamese women, the clown, Hercules, the hermaphrodite, the armless and the legless are happy and celebrating the union of Hans, the dwarf, with Cleopatra, the trapeze artist. Everyone laughs except Frieda, the Lilliputian who looks like a doll and is in love with Hans. The drunken scene, bacchanal of open and drooling mouths, is cut off by the shout of "freaks!" that releases the "normal" aerialist on all of them, while saying it to herself, without knowing it yet. In this way, with that yowl is sealed not only the extraordinary film that Tod Browing shooted in 1932, but the use of that word. Everything is going to be very different, in terms of imagination and semantics, after Freaks. The one who does know this is Daniel García, and against that backdrop, with that film and with the posters that advertised these attractions, the Freak Shows at fairs and circuses in the United States, he began to paint his acrobats. He paints those images of complicated poses, folded bodies and deformed postures on the edges of the canvas. There he makes them fit to start the routines of each one of them. He restricts the place to a minimum, in the small squares; takes it to its maximum expression, in the large formats. In any case, he transforms the redoubt contained in those frames into an experimentation arena.
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Not only in the twisting of limbs and trunks of the figures, García confirms that he knows how to decompose the human body, make it elastic and bend it until it is ready to be put in a pocket, but in that formal drift there is a sentimental journey, in going from what has been learned in figuration to the metamorphoses of new geometries The human form, so present in his paintings, attracts us with a singular empathy. The colors of the suits, those yellows, greens and muted blues, work as an emotional theory of color. The backgrounds are scratched and worn not only to account for the passage of time. Also to endow them with a certain longing, a singular affection for those objects rescued from time and memory. They are paintings to love as we do with some people and animals. Something strange happens with the legs that wrap us in hugs, turns that caress us, arms that attract us to slide through our eyes and close them to take us away. To a world of acceptances, of balance and good coexistence. Where we are accepted in our differences and that it is fulfilled, as in the aforementioned movie, that if we hurt one we are doing it to everyone. Because if that happens, we already know that the revenge of the freaks is true and ruthless.
Laura Isola, 2016 
Curatorial text for the exhibition Acrobats and Wolves