SECRETS AND LINES

Monique Espoirperdu and Jiro Attentat are two of the biggest unknown art collectors active today. This young couple are much better known as the founders and co-directors of Énigme Technique Français, the largest digital archive of discrete continuous range data systems in Europe. The business quarterly Richesse Tavelées refers to them as "the Pelléas and Mélisande of 21st century information marketing." They also own almost 40 pieces by my good-fortuned friend David Schoffman.

Monique Espoirperdu and Jiro Attentat: Double Portrait, David Schoffman 2011

I learned this on a recent visit to their modest villa in Cassis. I was given a tour of their collection by Monique and her extremely knowledgeable assistant Claudine and discovered the double portrait above hung prominently in the airy, light-filled salle à manger. 

It is an extremely uncharacteristic work for David and the way they told the story, he needed to be aggressively urged to accept the commission.  He worked from life and the right-hand section of Jiro came about fairly easily. The section of the left however, needed over eighty sittings and the process lasted for over a year and a half.

Claudine explained to me over coffee that the whole ordeal was a small cauchemar and that everyone involved was relieved when the picture was finally completed. "It was the stuff of a cheap romance novel," was how Claudine put it, "money, sex, more money, more sex, betrayal, treachery, scandal, drugs and the constant stench of turpentine everywhere!"

I wonder why David never mentioned any of this before.

Danikåa Blest

A faint metallic taste of failure lingered in the mouth of my good friend David Schoffman for many years. His was a particularly bitter type of heartbreak, the kind that mixes disillusionment with a crushing, amaroidal cynicism. Ten shows in ten years and still not a glimmer of recognition. I should hasten to add that the aforementioned decapod of exhibitions involved ten different dealers, a fact that speaks more of David’s tenaciousness than of the range of his contacts.

Danikåa Blest, Currado Malaspina 1998

From the spring of 1992 to the fateful fall of 2001 Schoffman lived in seven cities within four countries on three continents. While working in Barcelona he had a show in Geneva. While painting in Prague he exhibited in Paris and while living in Paris he showed in New York.

You get the idea.

The nadir of his unfulfillment was reached in Rome. It was there that he met the choreographer cum curator Danikåa Blest.

Best known for Hirtius and Caesar, her nine and a half hour marathon radio play, Blest was a major force in what has come to be known as the “Lazio School,” a loosely configured late twentieth  century collective of central Italian poets and playwrights. She commissioned Schoffman to design the sets for her 1998 production of the operetta, Against the Stepmother for Poisoning. When the show was cancelled after only three performances Danikåa secretly sold the sets to recoup her losses. 

David’s luck finally changed with the 2002 publication of Dahlia Danton’s best selling memoir The Palette-Knife Cuts Both Ways. In it she described Schoffman, Apelles and Giotto as her three major influences.

The critics soon took notice.

ART HISTORY: THE MUSICAL

Respected and admired throughout the U.K. David Schoffman's short art history primers have become beloved fixtures on the nation's airwaves. Underappreciated in his native country, the Brits take it as one more piece of irrefutable evidence that its former colony remains awash in narcotic provincialism. "In no other country on earth will you find the canonization of landlords and dog trainers while its artists and scholars remain stranded in an inky sea of obscurity," is how former MP Alban Montquinsberry put it.

You decide

APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH

THE PLANS AND PREPARATIONS FOR MY DEAR FRIEND'S FIRST LOS ANGELES EXHIBITION IN OVER TWO YEARS HAS BEEN A CLOSELY GUARDED SECRET ... UNTIL NOW!

This coming spring, at the venerable gallery ALT/SPACE LA,

home to some of Southern California's most idiosyncratic artists and performers, David will stage what will undoubtedly be seen as his most unusual spectacle to date.

BELIEF AND THE WHIMS OF EXISTENCE

THE DEBATE THAT RAGES BETWEEN THE SKEPTICAL AND THE DEVOUT HAS SEEPED INTO THE ARTWOLD

 I am comforted that my rhetorically gifted compatriot David Schoffman was invited as well to participate in this unusual forum. This coming March, at East London's Church of Saint Timinus the Deliverer between Bethnal Green and Shoreditch a symposium will be held to settle once and for all whether God exists.

The decision to feature three artists rather than the typical cast of theologians, philosophers, scientists and academics is an interesting one whose genesis lies in a casual remark tossed off at an informal reception at the Canadian embassy in Berne. Christian Harpaz, chargé d'affaires of the Swiss department of counter-terrorism, provoked by an off-color joke about an imam, a silent monk and a transvestite, lamented the poverty of imagination and lack of humor among atheists and agnostics.

"Things are more lively when artists altercate," offered the renown Catholic mime, Blathe Arket, "get a bunch of creative types in a lecture hall and then see what happens."

See what happens indeed!