Biography (UK)
Daniel Maillet was born in 1956 in Zurich. He studied visual communication at the CSIA in Lugano and continued his training to become an engraver with his Father Leo Maillet, a well-known German expressionist painter. In the year 1982 he studied Painting at the academy Brera in Milan. His work focuses on the drawing of life-size figures, through the observation of models. His portraits are influenced by a contemporary, expressionistic realism, without neglecting the figurative tradition of Mediterranean and central European Culture. In his later life he began to model clay figures, studying the correct composition and applying a method that allowed him to form clay figures out of a single block.
In the year 2002 Daniel Malliet moved to Brazil to create groups of terracotta through which his paintings gained more dimension and colour. He encountered Japanese ceramists living in the Brazilian tropics, build a studio, and developed the concept for a new type of high temperature oven for burning clay. Figurative sculpturing of large stoneware posed an important technic and expressive turning point for Daniels art. Thanks to the sintering of tones and poetic possibilities of fire-art. An artistic language which is not studied in Art institutions and academies and therefore rarely used in temporary sculpturing.
Malliet made another new experience of 3D printing, using a three-meter WASP Printer for Art editions of stoneware sintered statues. Now he wants to start a Start-up that establishes a base project for this innovative technology. To do so, Daniel temporarily moved to Monferrato Astigiano so that he can be in direct contact with Switzerland. He intends to promote this language of Sculpturing in direct, effective ways as it is lacking in current Art institutions. His Portraits are essential and direct, while simply ‘being’ is central to his poesy. In his own ways he thus follows in his fathers, Leo Malliet’s, footsteps, by exploring the craft of figurative art far away from the mainstream.
DM – MMXXIII