GRAVEN SILENCE



When David lived in Rome he had a small studio on Via della Reginella above an antiquarian book dealer named Castelvetro. Old Castelvetro would sit on a tattered folding chair in front of his shop immersed in the unraveling of knots plaiting long lengths of delicate twine. His gestures were slow and deliberate. Though void of all gaiety, he was profoundly unserious. With a glazier’s tact his feminine fingers would light ubiquitous cigarettes as he dispensed his primeval street wisdom. He spoke often of Italy and the Shoah, never with bitterness or anger but as if, through a verbal exertion, he could clarify a personal enigma.

One of his favorite books in his shop, a book he insisted he would never sell, was an early 19th century volume of the Talmudic tractate Sotah. He claimed it was the only remaining volume from the famous Leghorn Benedetti Edition. Schoffman was fascinated with this book.

Minimally ornamented, each page with its tiny marginalia of commentary, held for David a peculiar fascination. Castelvetro was very much taken with David’s passionate interest and allowed him to leaf through the surprisingly robust pages any time he felt like it.

David began doing drawings based on these pages and it is from these drawings came the idea for “The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings”.

Castelvetro passed away a few years ago and all my attempts to find out the fate of this beautiful book have come to naught. Perhaps it will turn up one day.

THE OTHER LOS ANGELES



I am happy to be back in Paris, though I fully enjoyed my short sojourn in Los Angeles. Despite what many of my countrymen believe, southern California is not a tattered patch of inarticularity. Who are we to pass judgment? Are we so innocent as to satisfy our flawed self-image with a nostalgic look at Camus, Foucault and Aron? I have news for you. For every Derrida there are a thousand sausage-makers.

Schoffman surrounds himself with an exciting coterie of distinguished artists and intellectuals, all living under the balmy palms of L.A. The poet, Justin Spens has a silver-tipped wit and an astonishing reservoir of eccentric anecdotes. Sitric Hogan, the bird-boned dulcimerist, has the tenderest demeanor and a gift for celestial sight. The satanic imagination of Colette Nolan is thrilling evidence of the obsolescence of interdiction. J. Courtney Wain, despite the inelastic honorific is a multi-levered lover of all things Baltic and is as at home with the lilting lyrics of Juhan Liiv as she is with the minimalism of Lepo Sumera. With all this stimulating company it is amazing that Schoffman finds any time to paint.

But he is, as the sculptor Bernard Fann told me as he dropped me off at LAX, the consummate workaholic. “He inhales with a casual greed what Wallace Stevens called the ‘debris of life and mind’. He exhales paintings.”

A RARE CLASH OF BELLS

The exhibition of David Schoffman’s paintings is an act of benevolence. Highly regarded internationally with a wide rabble of collectors and supporters, Schoffman prefers the unctuous carriage of a buttery mole to the extroverted flamboyance of a lionized genius. The crowds at DCA Fine Art this month recognize this rare opportunity, knowing that David and his work may vanish without a pant for the foreseeable future.

With only a couple of weeks left in the show (Delia Cabral is locked in a ricochet of intensive negotiation trying to extend the exhibition for at least an additional week), the crush of visitors has added an atmosphere of frenzy to the normally quiet gallery.

Careless wanderers mingle with inquisitive art students; swanky westside bon vivants rub elbows with humorless intellectuals: curators, consumed in the uncoiling of Schoffman’s visual puns nestle next to corporate art consultants looking for baubles compatible with Feng Shui.

One thing all have in common is the lamentable knowledge that Schoffman prefers to remain invisible and that if he’s up on the bandstand its best to get up and dance.

WHAT IS OBVIOUS MUST STILL BE STATED

I feel that I must rise to the defense of my friend and colleague, David Schoffman. Someone described his works at DCA as “puny pageants of painterly dexterity.” Another naysayer dilated over “the triviality of his technical mastery.” My favorite was the Dutch critic who called his work “the high watermark of vapid formal complexity for the sheer sake of perfection.”

It seems apparent that these observations are unaccountable to the actual history and conceptual underpinnings of these important pictures. Accustomed to the predictable academicism of post-modernism, David’s breathtaking originality evaded the scope of their understanding.

Far from the withdrawing roar of influence, distanced from the anxious gloss of history, Schoffman watched a thousand sleepless nights from his hilltop studio in East Jaffa where “Rattling Traffic” was conceived.

Based on the prison diaries of 17th century mutineer Carlos Bones, these works are meant to echo the artifacts of Bones’ cloying discontent. Bones, as he longed for what he called the “coughs of the strong seas,” drew strange pictograms on the margins of his scattered papers. Soft rain, surf, shorelines, splintered circles, rainbows twined with ribbons, shadows and piers are but a few of the images found in these diaries.

“Rattling Traffic” is the curve that mediates Bones’ bitter longings with Schoffman’s lamplit exile. Any close reading of David’s work makes this point more than perfectly clear.

THE FIRST NOTICES ARE BEGINNING TO APPEAR ...

This one from Hugo Ruggieri of Milano Finanza:

"David Schoffman began his inauspicious artistic apprenticeship with the pious intent of an honest cobbler. His early work was greeted, however, by the jeers and growls of New York’s critical community. Those first fruits prompted Schoffman toward silence and exile.

"In 1979, he moved to Paris where he met Currado Malaspina. Though he found the mercurial artist sad and opaque, they formed an artistic alliance based on a shared vision of what they called “divided reckonings.”

“'Rattling Traffic' with its buckled diamonds of pigment and channels of complicated forms found its genesis during those gray years abroad. Those faint traces and summery of spells are now fully realized in this odd and important series now on view at DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica, California, USA. "

A few days ago, by the solemn banks of Lake Arrowhead where the common life holds greater purchase than the consternations of high culture, I met with David Schoffman to smooth over our differences. We were joined in our Edenic retreat by DCA Fine Art’s governors of grace, Delia Cabral and Kristina Ramsay.

Amidst the nearly deafening arpeggios of the black-necked stilts and the low whistle of the abundant whimbrel, we navigated the estuaries of our disenchantments and reached something resembling a détente.

Kristina, who in her charcoal Barcelona resembled Mérimée's fiery Carmen, was stinging in her rebukes. “We are not at all interested in the bony roots of your infantile spat,” she roared with Antigonean resolve, “you are rotted by the shadows of memory, ruined by pride and disfigured by the phosphorescence of your piffling differences! Have pity and quiet the pendulum of your mutual denunciations! There is a dark cloud swelling over the gallery, discord leads only to the culverts of disaster.”

Properly chastened, our spirits plunged as if hurled from a tower. As we watched the Dipper rise over the glassy lake we shook hands with the weak grip of children. We muttered our apologies with the commonplaces of strangers.

I saw Schoffman’s eyes well up with tears.

I earnestly love that man.