Daniel Bum studied Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) and develops his pictorial practice within the contemporary framework of new figuration, where influences from art brut, naive aesthetics, manga, and urban art converge. His work is a hybrid territory in which disparate visual references coexist under a deeply personal and subjective narrative logic. Far from mimetic representation, his canvases do not illustrate real scenes; instead, they reformulate fragments of memory, emotional states, and thoughts through a direct and deliberately schematic visual language. In this symbolic construction, lived experience intertwines with fiction, generating images charged with ambiguity and emotional resonance.

His compositions are inhabited by solitary figures, depicted frontally, with absent gazes and minimal gestures that heighten their vulnerability. These characters, seemingly accessible and almost endearing, nonetheless reveal an enigmatic dimension marked by an underlying tension. This ambivalence—between the tender and the unsettling, the familiar and the inexplicable—is one of the expressive keys of his work. The imprint of art brut appears in his formal freedom, the spontaneity of his line, and the economy of means; naïf aesthetics contribute a simplicity that functions more as a distancing strategy than as naïveté. Manga introduces contemporary visual codes through stylized faces and frontal compositions, while graffiti and urban art resonate in the graphic force and communicative immediacy of his pieces.

Daniel Bum thus constructs a pictorial imaginary that does not seek to represent reality but to rewrite it from an introspective gaze, where each work functions as a narrative device capable of activating sensitive zones of individual and collective experience. In his painting, emotion becomes form, and the symbolic materializes as image, shaping a visual poetics that engages the viewer through its apparent simplicity.