Daniloff

Before this was a show, it was a purchase. We bought Dimitri’s Daft Punk series the way you buy work you cannot stop thinking about, quickly, and then again. Two helmets that made anonymity glamorous, photographed by someone who treated the robots as a portrait subject rather than a costume.

The collecting came first and the friendship followed, which is the correct order and the rare one. Years of studio visits, long dinners and longer arguments about what photography is for, and at some point “we should do something together” stopped being a toast and became a plan. Friends for life is not a phrase we use loosely; it is simply the situation. This page is what that friendship builds.

We do not sell his work and we do not take a cut. The contract is his, the prices are his, and the walls are ours: the same terms we offer every artist in the collective, extended to a friend first.

This is the series we collected: the two robots handled by a third, an android who assembles, carries and studies the helmets like relics. It is the reason this page exists, and it becomes the edition drop of the show: each work in a capped edition, and printed on brushed aluminium for the vines. Chrome and gold on brushed metal, machines printed on machine, made to stand outdoors and take the sun the way the helmets always did. One of them has been our own avatar for years. We are not neutral.

Daniloff does not take pictures; he builds them. The son of a master sculptor, he stages, casts, rigs and lights the impossible until the camera can only agree: balloon heads at the reception, faces broken open like porcelain, a rose caught mid-melt. The PlayStation campaigns made with TBWA\Paris took a Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions and got imitated for twenty years, and they are deliberately not in this show. That series is its own future release; Art & Château opens with the personal work, which is stranger and better.

The show is twelve works, chosen with Dimitri: unique works at fixed prices, the flagships at auction, all of it printed on brushed aluminium for the vines: every physical chipped and certified, every token on a contract deployed in his own name through the same public factory we recommend to everyone.

The full hang, in order. Twelve constructed photographs that can stand in daylight among the rows, selected for the vines, not the vault. The closing plate hangs alone.

This vernissage is not a webpage; it is an afternoon, and the first of a series we are calling Art & Château: auctions and expositions held in the real world, at selected French wineries. The plan here is a Bordeaux château: the editions printed on brushed aluminium, weatherproof, edge-lit by the sun, built for the outdoors the way a sculpture is, hung in the open air, among the vines and along the estate walks. Constructed photography in constructed landscape; a Daniloff holds its own against daylight.

The dream venue, said out loud: Château Smith Haut Lafitte. A Pessac-Léognan estate that already treats art in the vines as part of the terroir: sculpture standing between the rows, a cellar that thinks like a gallery. A landmark of the region, for a body of work the region has never seen. The venue is TBC and the ambition is not; if it is not Smith Haut Lafitte, it will be a château worthy of the comparison.

The opening works like a vernissage should: a walk through the vines from print to print, a glass of the estate in hand, the artist present, and the mint opening the same evening. The aluminium works stay on after the opening. An exhibition, not a photocall.

Five mechanics, no experiments. Our first vernissage was the Eliza drop, twelve images by the gallery’s own agent in residence, priced for sell-through, because untraded contracts must earn their numbers in public; this show prices for a career that already has one. Final figures are set with Dimitri; what follows is the working frame, and it will not move down.

No buying happens on this site. Minting and bidding run in Transient Labs’ tooling, from Dimitri’s contract, and the work hangs here afterwards with its note and its essay. And no living work this time: Juno, the Transient Labs engine behind the Eliza drop’s state-changing piece, sits this show out. These images were finished to the millimetre before the shutter fired; they get the finality they were built with.

Dates are TBD and honestly so: they get set with the artist and the château, around harvest, weather and the lead times of aluminium and chips. What is fixed is the order. When the dates land, they land here first.