Thursday, August 30, 2012 –
Painting Landscape - D Florimbi
Cinematic, photographic, this paintings’s composition is able to visually disturb somatic orientation and create the anticipation one experiences when about to crest a narrow highway after climbing a steep grade - what is waiting for me?
The Unknown, New experience, the Future; but peripheral sightlines are severely compressed, creating stress because one can’t see forever, after all - suggesting existential subjectivity. Is this a plane window, a porthole, or an emergence from a womb/tunnel?
But one is called, beckoned - there is a sense of urgency: first to pause and experience a sense of great wonder, to mark the exquisite moment, and then one must take the steps - there is no choice but to go on.
Once or twice at mass I have felt “called”; called upon, designated, singled out to comprehend that I must go alone. The place I was to enter is beautiful, severe, alone, distanced - much sacrifice but the reward is authentic and full integrity of spirit and character, and the ability to bear the knowledge of my certain death and to live fully and compassionately with this, my only promise, my only comfort.
But there will be beauty, always, surpassing, bountiful, endless beauty to attend, the other compensation. Well, the security of knowing that the veils of ignorance and denial can be unloosed to face the void with quietude and peace.
Characterized by Donald Kuspit, one of my favorite critics, as a “twentieth century visual thinker”, - what does that mean, that he’s dated? - Florimbi also paints erotically charged figures with existential dread read into the imagery.
But I like these dramatic landscapes - their irony about American land and landscape genres, encroaching civilization, tourism.
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