As part of his series about under-known artists, Raphael Rubinstein profiles the paintings of René Daniëls.

Rubinstein writes: "From today's perspective, Daniëls's points of reference and conscious influences seem impeccable: Polke, Broodthaers, Magritte's periode vache. But we shouldn’t forget how unlikely these choices were for a young painter in the late 1970s. Also worth noting are his frequent literary references. The Venal Muse, a title given to innocuous looking early paintings (1979) of swans and mussels, is borrowed from a Baudelaire poem depicting his muse (and, by implication the poet) as a prostitute. In 1984, Daniëls painted a marvelous big imaginary portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire in a bowler hat with an artist’s sketchbook under his arm. Adding poetry to Rasuchenberg’s formula, Daniëls once admitted to 'using the former no-man’s-land between literature, the visual arts and life.' "