For an avowed aesthete, my spartan friend David Schoffman lives a life of cultivated immunity. If this seems like an obvious contradiction it's because his unsystematic, self-abrogating lifestyle is just an elaborate form of hypocrisy.
Some admire his 'purity' - he eats neither meat nor kidney beans (the latter said to resemble too comfortably the form of a human embryo), owns neither a computer nor a telephone and restricts his philandering to those over the age of majority - though most see in his behavior a perverse form of Baudelairean dandysme.
It's unpleasant socializing with him, he abjures too much. He is my inverse reflection, my antipodal doppelganger, my corresponding counter-comrade and the fact that our friendship has endured this long is a tribute to the irrational. I, as an unapologetic gourmand, a lover of food and wine and noise, find being around David with all his severity is like being enveloped in a dark medieval cloak of overbearing piety. Even his musical tastes (if you can grant him the charity of having any taste at all) are spartan in the extreme. Anything beyond the homophonic jolts him into spasms of anxious agitation. It's as if a deviant voice or an independent rhythm might threaten his equilibrium.
Perhaps he conserves his felonious impulses for the studio. His paintings reflect the opposite of his celibate demeanor. They are plush, grandiose, sybaritic romps of sensuality and excess.
Few people know the wild side of Schoffman. Most just witness his overt pretensions to high cultural priesthood. But in his studio, with his doors locked and his halogen kliegs tilted to Euclidean perfection, David is a libertine monster of luxury and over-statement. It is the only place he feels completely at home and it is there, and only there where he finds that vague, sloppy sensation that some refer to as 'happiness.'
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| A Symmetry of Edens, oil on linen, 11 x 6 feet, David Schoffman, 2013 |
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