David Florimbi - Donald Kuspit

Woman with Child, 1996

The figure in Untitled (figure) can be read as a falling Prometheus, the Woman with Child alludes to the Madonna and Child theme, the figure in Floater II may be an enthroned Madonna, the Racing Figure in the sky alludes to angels, and the figure in Floater is peculiarly Icarian. But what makes Florimbi's paintings convincing, apart from their quixotic appropriation--ironical reprise?--of traditional motifs, is their construction and painterliness.

Giotto, The Dream of Joachim, 1310

whole are entitled "Station Crossing," an oblique allusion to the 'Stations of the Cross;' the disturbed movement of more or less tragic figures, now mythical shadows of themselves, is the subtle point.

Particularly striking is their Cubist-type fragmentation--conspicuously evident in Horse II, with its dissection of the rearing horse (Renaissance inspired?)--into planar segments, doubling the horse's presence while forming an abstract grid that seems independent of it. One recalls the traditional technique of grid division of a figure--famously illustrated in a Dürer print--in order to better focus and analyze the details of its appearance. In Florimbi's pictures the vertical lines continue into infinite sky--the radiantly blue sky--while the horizontal lines extend into the landscape. The contrast between the heavily painted body of the heavy

Florimbi, Horse II, 1997

Albrecht Durer, Four Horsemen of the Apocopypse,1498, woodcut.

horse, looking somewhat calcified or petrified, as its chalky and brownish colors suggest--it seems like a freshly excavated sculpture, still marked by the earth and death--and the more thinly painted blue, adds to the tension generated by the fragmentation of the figure. The fragmentation of the picture's space, making the figure more dramatically present and highlighting it by lifting it out of the surrounding space, recurs again and again, for example, in Woman with Child, Floater II, Racing Figure, and Big Daddy. Untitled (figure) is completely "gridified," and Touching the Surface is "allusively" gridified, as the vertical drips and horizontal clouds imply.

There is clearly a nostalgia for the grandeur of past art and its all too human themes, charged with mythopoetic meaning in Florimbi, but it is kept in check by his constuctivist tendencies and, above all, in my opinion, his painterliness. The atmospheric brushstrokes that compose the cloud in Floater and the thick blue shadow his head casts make the point clearly. The expressionistic gestures composing the landscape in Racing Figure jump out of the picture, and the clouds in virtually all the works are abstract expressionist in import. Their handling confirms their storm-tossed quality--their Sturm und Drang energy. There is often an oddly lurid quality to the gestures, especially evident in the sensual redness of Woman with Finger, confirming their unconscious import. The color is often glowering and ominous, as in the lower part of Floater II and throughout Big Daddy and Touching the Surface. Florimbi is indeed concerned with texture, often as expressively edgy and threatening as his colors. He may be dealing with ruins of memory--anxiously recollecting traditional imagery--but his visual thinking is twentieth century.

I think Florimbi is a fantasist using modernist methods of handling and construction--distortion and displacement--to add urgency to his archetypal fantasies, that is, to enhance their aura of dread. Touching the Surface is an important example--expressively convincing both as conception and execution. A naked young girl, her head moving in agitation, her arms raised in fear, her skin luminous, stands vulnerably above an abyss, its surface covered by a mesh of black gestures so that it resembles a trap used to catch jungle animals. She dips a toe into this morbid hole--a pool, no doubt, as the blue drips that fall on it imply, but also a hellish space, as its brackish look suggests. She is framed by blue clouds, and beyond them, dirty white storm clouds. I suggest that the work is an allegory of female sexuality. Is she about to take the plunge, as it were? Is the pool-hole a magnified projection of her unconscious sense of her own vagina?

Fanciful ideas, no doubt, but clearly there is a sense of danger, and the maiden's hesitancy. Sexuality rears its disturbing head again in Big Daddy, with his hands around the buttocks of the naked woman he perversely presses to himself (the whiteness of her skin suggests her virginity, the brownness of his skin suggests his brutality)--is the work an ironical reprise of Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalos, 1828?--and, of course, is implicit in Woman With Finger. Sex, power, and spirituality seem to be Florimbi's basic themes. He gives them modern form and fresh impact even as he filters them through traditional art.

Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalos, 1828

Though Untitled Head II might seem like an anomaly in the context of Florimbi's imagistic oeuvre--some fourteen years of work are in the exhibition--it seems to be a tour-de-force of painterly handling and emotional expression. The paint is applied both densely and subtly, the colors are white, siena and blue, each subtly blackened. The soiled, ghostly heads stands out of the brown-blueish darkness with emotional precision. The work is an abstract fantasy of vulnerable humanity at its most enigmatic. I think it is the climax of Florimbi's urge to paint existentially.

Donald Kuspit, 2007

Untitled Head II, 2007


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