Daniel Erban was born in Israel in 1951. His mother was a survivor of Auschwitz and his father managed to escape the Nazis and went to war in a British army tank. They left Israel for Canada in 1964. Daniel Erban arrived in Montreal at the age of fourteen and became a mathematics teacher; but can the numbers can protect the incalculable? His drawings are in the hundreds ─he planted them like the trees of the Forest of the Martyrs in Israel: one tree for each death. This memory is present in each of his prints and drawings, both direct allusions to the Shoah, through depictions of violent scenes and the graphic elements he uses: a fragile line like a thread of ink or tortured and hard like wire, and a thick black line like the bar of prison window. We find this graphic violence in his rare paintings, but also sometimes find in them the gentleness of hope.
Daniel Erban died in 2017, after a great deal of suffering.
Patrick Cady
