Figurative painter Daniel Adel divides his focus between his own pursuits and commissioned projects. When he is not lampooning celebrities, politicians, and businesspeople in satirical cartoons for the world’s leading publications, or painting august portraits of a range of sitters, he concentrates on picturesque watercolors of the village of Lacoste and fantastical oil paintings referencing antiquity and classical sculpture. He is inspired by these pre-modern periods, and by Old Master paintings, which fuel an approach to art-making that he describes as tapping “into what you are absolutely, instinctively drawn to, and…synthesizing [it] into something that hasn’t been seen before.” Perhaps his most unique project is Adel’s sustained exploration of the varied visual resonances of a shape-shifting piece of white cloth. He renders the cloth photorealistically, in oil on canvas or panel, twisted and knotted into fanciful forms.