The Days Are Numbered

A visual artist with an extensive published bibliography and an international career, Daniel Blaufuks (b. 1963) has developed a visual-textual diary in which he comments on current events and his life since 2018. At MAAT, he presents The Days Are Numbered, showing his diary for the year 2023, together with some days from the previous five years, and his entries for the first few months of 2024. The more than 450 works include photographs, collages, and clippings with personal notes, referencing brief stories, quotes and comments.
 
According to the artist, this diary has become the task of a lifetime. By exposing his memory, his days and the days of the world intersect. On simple landscape A4 sheets, the artist numbers the days/years as they go by; he pastes in polaroids (one or two per page) and clippings, and handwrites or stamps phrases (his own or quoted without reference) in the languages he knows best (English, German, Portuguese, French). Here we can see the intersection of themes that we are by now accustomed to find in his work, such as the connection between time and space, and the representation of private and public memory, more precisely family, personal, historical, political and cultural memories.
 
As João Pinharanda, the exhibition's curator, writes in the text Memory is a betrayal of time, which accompanies the exhibition: "The artist reacts to his surroundings by fighting against time?s voracious march over all things. If he doesn't annul time, he at least slows it down, postponing the erasure of things; but it is significant that he calls this work a "non-diary", and that he refers to "non-portraits" when he talks about the faces of some of the interlocutors he fixes on these pages. This double negative classification, a confession of impotence, exposes the inevitable contradiction of all records of memory ? that oblivion is their destiny."
 
While some months of this non-diary have already been presented in France, this is the first time the artist has exhibited this project in Portugal and the first time he has exhibited a full year.
 
On the occasion of the exhibition, the Portuguese and English versions of the book where the artist presents this project for the first time will be published as Os Dias Estão Numerados by Tinta-da-china and as The Days Are Numbered by JBE/JKG Books, available on our store.