DAILY ALLOWANCE
A series of six post-abstract artworks
Created collaboratively by Odd Jobs and Lisanne Haack, bound into a limited edition, hand-crafted book.
Collect on Exchange Art
ESSAY
Dear Mr. Rossellini, — I saw your films ‘Open City’ and ‘Paisan’, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only “ti amo,” I am ready to come and make a film with you. — Ingrid Bergman
Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman wrote this now legendary letter to Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini in 1947. Not knowing where to reach him, it was sent to his studio, the Minerva Film Corporation in Rome, where a worker saved it from a huge pile of correspondence being burned as trash. Rossellini received it on May 8, 1948, and responded first with a short telegram together with a brief synopsis for a Stromboli-like project.
I just received with great emotion your letter, which happens to arrive on the anniversary of my birthday, as the most precious gift. It is absolutely true that I dreamed to make a film with you.
What followed was a deeply symbiotic and fertile epistolary relationship that gave birth to a passionate romance and, most importantly, to five of the greatest films of all time.
This is the story that came straight to my mind when I first saw this collaborative series, ‘Daily Allowance’ — the meaning of the Latin root word for ‘diary’. The polished monochrome palette, the intimacy of the small format, the portrait orientation of the canvas, and the prevalence of the calligraphic line as the protagonist formal element, make this body of six post-abstract digital paintings feel like correspondence, like private hand-written letters by Daniel Curtis and Lisanne Haack, mailed back and forth from London to Barcelona.
The audacity of the compositions, the intelligence of the brush size dynamics, the certainty of the negative space, the subtle brilliance of the texture games are a given. However, what makes these works beyond fascinating is their conversational dimension, the capacity of both artists to take their time to listen carefully to what has already been said, before responding, most of the time with another question.
Mrs. Bergman, could you possibly come to Europe? I could invite you for a trip to Italy, and we could go over this thing at leisure? Would you like me to go in for this film? When? What do you think of it? Excuse me for all these questions, but I could go on questioning you forever. Pray believe in my enthusiasm. — Yours, Roberto Rossellini
