REJOICING IN FRUITION

A CANNY PHOTOGRAPHER CAUGHT THE REMARKABLE MOMENT.

Schoffman accepting the Plume Puant from Shulamit Görög

UPSTAGED EARLIER IN THE EVENING BY AN ENNOBLING ALBEIT LENGTHY HOMAGE TO THE CZECH PAINTER TAVIK TRAMPOTA, MY THIN-SKINNED COMRADE DAVID SCHOFFMAN WAS PREPARED FOR YET ANOTHER PROFESSIONAL ECLIPSE.


THE OCCASION WAS THE THIRTY-THIRD ANNUAL GRU RICKRACK FESTIVAL IN TIMISOARA. RICKRACK IS A VENUE FOR SOME OF THE MOST OFFBEAT WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY "ART" AND TENDS TO CAST ITSELF AS A SORT OF "ANTI VENICE BIENNALE." A TEDIOUS AWARDS CEREMONY MARKS THE CONCLUSION OF THE TWO-WEEK EVENT AND DAVID'S SHORT VIDEO LE FRISSON ABATTU WAS THE ODDS ON FAVORITE FOR LA PLUME PUANT.


THE BUZZ SURROUNDING THIS TRULY ORIGINAL WORK DID NOT PREVENT DAVID FROM EXERCISING HIS OVERRIDING PREDISPOSITION FOR PESSIMISTIC DEFEATISM. HE WAS CERTAIN THAT CLAUDINE ON BUSH STREET BY THE INIMITABLE FILMMAKING COLLECTIVE, POSSIBLE PICTURES WOULD CARRY THE DAY, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY WON THE PLUME FOUR TIMES WITHIN THE PAST SIX YEARS.


WHEN HIS NAME WAS ANNOUNCED HE WAS VISIBLY STIRRED AND GENUINELY STUNNED. SERBIAN PERFORMANCE ARTIST, SHULAMIT GOROG PRESENTED THE AWARD AND LATER DAVID CONFESSED THAT FOR YEARS HE ENJOYED LUMINOUS HALLUCINATIONS AND VIVID FANTASIES OF PLANTING A CORRUPTED KISS ON THE MILKY CHEEK OF THIS LOVELY AND TALENTED WOMAN.

FATE HOLDS NO PRIZE

MY GOOD FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN AND I SHARE A DEAR MUTUAL FRIEND. ESSAYIST AND PHILOSOPHER, MARTA SONNETTO, HAS BEEN A CONSTANT PRESENCE IN BOTH OUR LIVES FOR MANY, MANY YEARS.

Portrait of Marta Sonnetto by Dahlia Danton, 2005

BORN IN SORRENTO IN 1939, SONNETTO INSCRUTABLY CLAIMED THAT SHE WAS NURSED ON LIMONCELLO AND LEARNED TO READ FROM A TATTERED, WATERLOGGED COPY OF  TASSO'S GERUSALEMME LIBERATA, THE ONLY BOOK HER PARENTS OWNED. HER MOST WIDELY READ WORK, THE 947  PAGE DISPERAZIONE O INDIGESTIONE, A THOROUGH THOUGH DEEPLY FLAWED CRITIQUE OF HER MENTOR, LEV SHESTOV, WAS ADAPTED INTO A POPULAR TELEVISION SERIES AND MADE SONNETTO A HOUSEHOLD NAME THROUGHOUT THE MEDITERRANEAN. DAVID AND I MET HER WHILE WE WERE STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI FEDERICO II. HER LEGENDARY THOUGH SPARSELY ATTENDED SPRING SEMINAR, ARRENDERSI CONTRO SFORZARSI, (PLAYFULLY REFERRED TO BY HER STUDENTS AS "CHE CAZZO E IL PUNTO") REMAINS A SOURCE OF GREAT INSPIRATION TO THE TWO OF US.

WHERE DAVID AND I DIFFER IS ON HOW BEST TO INTERPRET, OR INDEED, TO WHAT DEGREE TAKE SERIOUSLY SONNETTO'S ATTACHMENT TO THE NOTION OF INEVITABLE DESPAIR. DAVID CHANNELS HIS ANALYSIS THOUGH HIS WORK, SEEING HIS PAINTINGS AS A NECESSARY PALLIATIVE, AN ADAPTIVE CONSOLATION FOR THE INTELLIGENT RELINQUISHMENTS OF CONVENTIONAL FAITH.

I PREFER THE ANTIDOTAL BENEFITS OF BUPROPION, IMIPRAMINE AND AMITRIPTYLINE.

FALSE MODESTY

IN THE SPRING OF 2002 MY UNFEASIBLE FRIEND, DAVID SCHOFFMAN, BEGAN WORK ON WHAT LATER BECAME KNOWN AS THE BODY IS HIS BOOK: 100 PAINTINGS, A QUIXOTIC ENTERPRISE THAT ENVISIONED A ROOM PACKED WITH MESMERIC, SYNCOPATED, ODDLY INTERRELATED, OBSESSIVELY DETAILED OIL PANELS. NOW, NINE LONG YEARS LATER AND THE PROJECT IS NEARLY COMPLETE.

OR IS IT?

WHILE VISITING DAVID IN HIS LOS ANGELES STUDIO LAST MONTH I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO DISCUSS WITH HIM HIS WORK, HIS IDEAS, HIS DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS AND HIS MORE PLENTIFUL DISAPPOINTMENTS. SPEAKING IN BROKEN, RUDIMENTARY HIGH SCHOOL FRENCH (AT HIS INSISTENCE ... NOT MINE), IN TURN DEFIANT, DEFENSIVE, ELEGIAC AND EXHAUSTED, DAVID WAS MORE THOUGHTFUL THAN I'D REMEMBERED. 


"J'ai raté ma vie." His sad and palpable regret would have been heartbreaking had I been more sympathetic. But his claim that he somehow lived amidst a ruin of his own design, that he had mismanaged his life and squandered his opportunities rang as hollow as a chocolate Easter egg. Before me sat a man who has been fêted by monarchs, flattered by starlets, relentlessly pursued by oligarchs and executives, written about by scholars, scorned by rivals and honored by academics and he still claims that "J'ai baisé tous."


The man lacks gratitude and has lost all perspective. And now that The Body Is His Book is almost complete, with head in hand he dejectedly deadpans  "Je veux recommencer à zéro."

Start over again!!?? The paintings are ferocious in their intensity, vivid in their luster, complex in their intent and immaculate in their conception ... and he wants to start over again?  


The man must be protected from himself.

A COURTEOUS MAN

ROME IS ABLAZE WITH THE THOUGHTFULLY SCATHING CRITIQUE OF MY GOOD FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN BY THE TALK SHOW HOSTESS, SALLY VESTUTA. 
AN UNLIKELY SUBJECT FOR EDIZIONI GUCCINI, ITALY'S BOUTIQUE PUBLISHING HOUSE AMONG WHOSE RECENT TITLES INCLUDE "BARISTE E SPOSE," BASED ON A POPULAR SOAP OPERA AND THE CONTROVERSIAL MEMOIR "I MIEI TESTICOLI."

OMO CORTESE OR "A COURTEOUS MAN," THIS NEW BOOK ADVANCES THE THEORY THAT DAVID'S HIGHLY AMBITIOUS WORK IS ULTIMATELY FLAWED, NOT ONLY BY ITS GOOD INTENTIONS BUT BY THE VERY DECENCY OF THE ARTIST HIMSELF. EXHAUSTIVE IN ITS REACH AND THOROUGH IN ITS ANALYSIS, VESTUTA FOCUSES ON THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE OF PAINTING AND ITS FATAL LACK OF CULTURAL IMPACT.


THE PRODUCT OF TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF BACKBREAKING RESEARCH, VESTUTA CONDUCTED OVER NINE HUNDRED INTERVIEWS AND HAD COMPLETE ACCESS TO SCHOFFMAN'S NOTEBOOKS, DIARIES AND CORRESPONDENCES.

I MIGHT ADD THAT I AM INCLUDED IN A LENGTHY FOOTNOTE ON PAGE 343. IN IT I'M QUOTED AS SAYING "PHYSICAL EXILE AND INTELLECTUAL DISPLACEMENT ARE THE TWINNED DETRIMENTS TO THE SCHOFFMAN OEUVRE." 


I'M FLATTERED BY THE INCLUSION BUT HONESTLY ... CURRADO MALASPINA SIMPLY DOESN'T TALK LIKE THAT.

PRIX DE CONSOLATION

DEAR FRIEND, ESTEEMED SCHOLAR, ACERBIC CRITIC AND GENEROUS ART PATRON FABIOLA DU PLESSIS VOEUX HAS DIED.

Fabiola du Plessis Voeux, charcoal on paper, David Schoffman 2009

For over forty years Plessis Voeux was a treasured member of the Académie de l'Art et le Climat Doux in Aubechies. Her books include Crispin van der Broeck and the Guild of St. Luke, Treize à la Douzaine: Pastry and Painting in the Kingdom of Navarre and most recently,  Aniconism and Ambiguity in the Work of David Schoffman. 

Her work, though stunningly original in its scholarship has always been popular with the general reader. Winner of the Abrahamic Writer's Circle Prize for her weekly column in La Nouvel Philologue,Fabiola had a knack for making even the most marginal and recondite readable for the layman.

She was particularly fond of my good friend David Schoffman, whose work she misread and overly appreciated. In a 2002 interview on TF1, Fabiola called Schoffman's unfinished series of paintings, The Body Is His Book, the "most ambitious artistic project since Carracci's Farnese frescoes."

She will be sorely missed ... especially by David.

SENEX BIS PUER

IT IS AN ARTICLE OF FAITH AMONG CERTAIN SECTORS OF THE ARTISTIC COMMUNITY THAT MY FAITHFUL FRIEND, DAVID SCHOFFMAN, IF NOT DOWNRIGHT CRAZY, IS DARKLY MANIACAL AND FATALLY ERRATIC.

Ab Asino Lanam, David Schoffman, 2011

HOW ELSE CAN ONE EXPLAIN THE CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING THE COMPLETION OF HIS LATEST MONUMENTAL PIECE, AB ASINO LANAM.

SHOWCASED AT THIS YEAR'S GRINDAVIK BIENNIAL, THE WORK CONSISTS OF TWENTY-EIGHT 4 FOOT SQUARE PANELS DEPICTING VARIOUS STATES OF HUMAN VITALITY AND REPOSE. ORIGINALLY INTENDED FOR THE GRAND PALAIS DE PITRERIES IN BAVIGNE WHERE IT WAS TO INCLUDE THREE TIMES AS MANY PANELS, THE WORK WAS EDITED DOWN TO A MANAGEABLE 16 BY 28 FEET.

TO SCHOFFMAN, SIZE IS EVERYTHING. I HAVE SEEN THIS WORK WHILE IT WAS IN PROGRESS. DAVID RENTED AN ABANDONED MILITARY AIRPORT HANGAR ABOUT TWELVE MILES EAST OF LAS VEGAS AND WITH THE HELP OF A SMALL ARMY OF SHOWGIRLS, DANCERS AND STRIPPERS COMPLETED NO LESS THAN 700 IMAGES IN THE SPACE OF ONLY TWO AND A HALF MONTHS.

THE MERITS OF SUCH AN ENTERPRISE ARE DEBATABLE AT BEST BUT TO THOSE OF US FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO HAVE VISITED HIM DURING THE PROCESS, IT WAS AN AWE INSPIRING PERFORMANCE OF WILL, DISCIPLINE AND MEGALOMANIA.

I ALSO GOT TO SEE DON RICKLES, THE SPINNERS AND PAT BENATAR!

INELEGANT LARCENY

ARTISTIC INGENUITY IS A VALUE I PRIZE ABOVE ALL OTHERS. PERHAPS MY MOTH-EATEN VALUES HAVE FALLEN INTO DECREPITUDE BUT MY IDEAL OF CONCEPTUAL ORIGINALITY IS ONE I STILL HOLD DEAR. MY GOOD FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN IS APPARENTLY UNIMPAIRED BY THIS ADORABLY FOSSILIZED NOTION.

Interterrene, Twickenham Codex, 1786

THE IMAGE ABOVE IS FROM THE FAMOUS TWICKENHAM CODEX. THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT WHICH DATES FROM THE LATE 18TH CENTURY IS LOCATED IN THE KUHSCHEIßE ANTHNEUM IN SAARLAN. THE ENTIRE VOLUME IS RICHLY ILLUMINATED WITH WONDERFULLY ECCENTRIC IMAGES. EACH PAGE IS A SMALL UNIVERSE OF METICULOUSLY RENDERED DETAIL FULL OF COUNTERPUNCTUAL PATTERNS AND LABYRINTHINE DESIGNS.

The Body Is His Book #46, David Schoffman 2010

EXHIBIT A

THE NAKED APPROPRIATION AND INSOLENT INFERENCES IN SCHOFFMAN'S PICTORAL PURSE-SNATCHINGS ARE SLACK, DILATORY AND BENEATH THE STATURE AND DIGNITY OF THE PAINTERLY PROFESSION.

SNAP OUT OF IT, DAVID ... YOU'RE BETTER THAN THAT!

SON HISTOIRE ET SES CAUSES

BACK AT WORK IN HIS RUSTIC, ROOMY, LOS ANGELES STUDIO, MY HOPEFUL ALLY, DAVID SCHOFFMAN IS DETERMINED TO PROVE HIS CRITICS WRONG.

Though the critics were enthralled by my modest offerings 

at the Top Tomato show, they were far less captivated by David's overwrought and torpid polyptych. In an otherwise temperate review, Didier Sepharad of La Sonnette Hebdomadaire described Schoffman as a 'visual gasbag" (gascon visuelle). Caustically, he continued with a series of ad hominem characterizations, calling him, among other things a "bloviating Saussurian" (crieur Saussurian). Not to be outdone, Francoise Shalosh, chief cultural critic of L'Image Acoustique, France's leading literary periodical called Shoffman's (sic) work "yammering carrion" (des cadavres parlants) "unfit for public consumption" (impropres à la consommation publique).

All in all David has taken it all in stride, chalking it up to anti-Semitism and the deep cultural divide between France and the United States.

Le Mauvais Rêve

Displaced and disoriented by the incommodious agonies of trans-Atlantic transit, I shuffled, sore and somnolent into a gallery awash with strangers. The April 2nd vernissage at ART/SPACE LA @ Top Tomato was an oddity of the first order.

Eboli, oil on panel, David Schoffman 2011

 My capricious colleague David Schoffman enjoyed all the companionable advantages of a welcoming crowd. I, on the other hand, was treated like a miscreant. The three-person exhibition was crocheted into an incoherent burble of argumentative images. While the hagiographic  tabernacles from the departed Micah Carpentier vied uneasily with Schoffman's large sepulchral atrocity my subtle and understated works on paper hung on the main wall with a quiet and profound dignity.

Adding to the clumsy inadhesion was a bizarrely beautiful kabuki that arrived unannounced and departed unexplained and left the stunned spectators wondering if David's famous aesthetic indecision is an act of poetry or ineptitude. 

DE METEORIS

Sixteenth century Alto-Adigian artist Ezra Sangiori, a painter whose sublime frescoes grace countless villas and chapels throughout his native Rovereto has always been a favorite of my dear friend David Schoffman.

Putti Leccacazzi, attributed to Ezra Sangiori 1588

 Though intellectually ill equipped and undisciplined, Schoffman has recently been entrusted to compile, collect and curate the first ever Sangiori master drawing exhibition. The task is difficult. Sangiori worked during a period of major landslides and throughout the centuries many of the structures that housed his work have suffered severe structural damage. Attribution has proven to be a delicate enterprise with all Renaissance artists of the Trento l'Adice but this is especially true of Sangiori. Schoffman's untrained eye has already stirred a brass clatter of backbiting controversy regarding Sangiori's famous Disegni di Putti, a series of particularly battered works recently discovered in the Vallagarina Geniza.

When I asked David why he got involved in the first place with a task so clearly over his head, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully and recited from memory: 

"Qual è quel toro che si slaccia in quella c'ha ricevuto già 'l colpo mortale".

THE CONSOLATIONS OF PAINTING (POORLY)

My somber and serious friend David Schoffman sits in his studio and reflects upon the history of hardship. Not hardship in the abstract nor hardship as a universal condition. No, Schoffman's reflections are restricted to the local, the proximal and the personal. The history of hardship to my dear friend David is the history of his own undoing and the unraveling hardships he himself has "endured."

A recent book by Lee Cuypt, a distinguished fellow at the McTeague Institute in Cambridge argues that like many creative people, David Schoffman has faced many private and professional crucibles. In his view,what makes Schoffman unusual is his unique and stubborn inflexibility and his "hubristic opacity toward introspection and growth".  Cuypt patiently takes the reader through a chronology of David's  lengthy exhibition record, from the first one-man show at Verdurin/Bloch in 1978 to his most recent at Alt/Space LA. He finds a disturbing pattern in that when faced with an aesthetic choice, David invariably opts for the least accommodating, the least accessible and as a consequence, the most hermetic. He has alienated his allies and armed his detractors with an encyclopedia of justifiable jibes and jeremiads.

David has skillfully constructed his own isolation and operates in a figurative jail cell awaiting his execution. He lives a fantasy where his contemporaries are cast as charlatans and knaves and he alone righteously upholds and maintains the Western Tradition. Professor Cuypt cleverly calls this the  "Boethius Complex" and has written an elegantly argued polemic that will remain the standard text in Schoffman studies for a long time to come.

SIMULACRUM

"I HAVE BECOME A PROBLEM TO MYSELF."
MY DEAR FRIEND AND MENTOR, THE LATE MICAH CARPENTIER WAS FOND OF CITING THE CONFESSIONS OF AUGUSTINE.

Our Lady of Charity, Santiago de Cuba

David Schoffman's studio, Culver City, California

Beside his great works, Carpentier left little behind. It was as if he had envisioned his tragic, premature death and in preparation, denuded himself of the superfluous. Among the many relics in El Sanctuario de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre, the historic basilica nestled in the foothills of Cuba's Sierra Maestra, is a small box containing the few things Micah did not consider impedimenta. Each object is doused with significance and sentimentality, or so claims my colleague David Schoffman.

I saw an exact facsimile in Schoffman's Los Angeles studio and I suspect that David might be running a neat cottage industry in Carpentier curio of questionable provenance.

COITUS INTERRUPTUS

Hokusai had his One-Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Hiroshige had his Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road, Yahweh had his Decalogue and now, my prolific friend David Schoffman  has his Twenty-Eight Rungs of Lust Deferred, a stunning graphic tour de force.

Chaste self-abnegation is a theme that has preoccupied David for many years. His 1998 lecture "Late Renaissance Religious Imagery and the Interrupted Urges of Michelangelo," delivered at l'Università di Eboli's Istituto di Ricerca Arcane and later published in the anthology Abstemious Art & Artists (Sheleg Books, 2001), posits the theory that immaculate self-discipline between 1490 and 1600 was a common and conscious aesthetic posture. Poets and painters, in direct opposition to Aretino's rakish, libertine excesses, proposed a more temperate trope and devoted their art toward an almost Tantric pre-climactic form of fulfillment. Michelangelo's Creation being the prime example of this type of erotic adjournment. 

Schoffman's theories are what we call in France, connerie pur and I'm sure, at heart, he knows this. He apparently was up for tenure and felt the need to gild the scholarly lily.

La Pensée Sauvage

My hapless friend David Schoffman's early attempts at systematic ethnographic research were costly though radiant failures.

Kaitabhuto Figurine - Java

As a young man, Schoffman spent months at a time trekking through unforgiving terrain in far flung countries looking for uncooked, untamed artifacts. Unlike a professionally trained researcher, David left the terra firma with a series of ideés fixes hoping to find confirmation in situ.

Chief among his biases was the assertion that any societal/cultural phenomena encoded in artisanal production has, at root, an instinctive urge for chaos and disruption. This hairbrained theory came from a dyslexic-driven misreading of Marcel Mauss' Essai Sur Le Don.

After fourteen years of sporadic dysentery, vague inflammations, assorted bug-bites and several near-death experiences, David returned to the comforts of cable tv and indoor plumbing without a single original thought but with a trove of wonderful drawings.

I'm told that in the United States, graduate school is an essential step for all ambitious artists. Though this idea is mocked here in France, perhaps David would have been better served by this more conventional rite-of-passage.

ALOOF AND FRAIL

THE EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENTS HAVE BEEN SENT OUT AND I AM PLEASED THAT THE IMAGE CHOSEN TO REPRESENT THE THREE OF US IS ONE OF MY DRAWINGS.

Carpentier of course, has no dog in this dispute but my good friend, collaborator and rival, David Schoffman, baring his irascible teeth  has decided to refight the long forgotten Guerre de Clichy. 

It was perhaps twenty five years ago in a small gallery on rue Truffaut, not far from l'Église Sainte-Marie-des-Batignolles that I first noticed the stain of Schoffman's pestiferous predilection for competition. Making art for David is not a vocation but rather a furious and unrelenting blood sport. Unlike me and I dare say, Micah as well, he doesn't see his work as a sublime calling but more as an untamed cris-d'armes. Jousting with sheep and tilting at windmills David sees adversaries where others see colleagues and fellow-travelers.

We were involved in a group exhibition, similar to the one coming up next month in Los Angeles, and David insisted that the invitation list his name first and include a reproduction of one of his pieces at the exclusion of everyone else. The predictable outrage ensued and the festering scent of acrimonious discord followed the show throughout its duration and well beyond.

I understand that no small degree of excitement and anticipation surround the ALT/SPACE LA show. The pre-publicity has been generous and flattering. The public seems genuinely interested. Only David Schoffman is choked with suspicion and apprehension. Only David drowns in an absinthian dread.

Only David is capable of snatching collapse from within the jaws of luxury and triumph.

JOYCE AND NORA IT'S NOT

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, high profile, high octane creative couples are rare and powerful phenomena. Rarer still is the durable conjugation that triumphs over egoism and sustains the participant pair into greater and greater artistic achievement.

If this blog were a work of fiction I would continue by describing the truly inspiring partnership of my good friend David Schoffman and the gifted and charming Dahlia Danton. Unfortunately the truth is rather tawdry. Friction and discord wrapped their torrid romance in a shroud of unnecessary misery. Alarming salvos of hysteria and turmoil were their preferred vernacular. Their verbal violence was legendary as was their concomitant concupiscence and perfidious disloyalty.
The imminent Los Angeles exhibition, The Gasp of Love in Terza Rima promises to be a contentious affair. I'm told that Danton will be in town for the opening and has made it plain that she fully intends on asserting a deliberately provocative presence. This may prove to be awkward. As has been amply documented, Danton and I,  like Paolo and Francesca, have been bested by the appetites and my friendship with Schoffman has scarcely recovered. The work I intend to exhibit at ALT/SPACE LA happens to be a lurid, graphic chronicling of our miscellaneous adventures. The delicate and faint-hearted would be well-advised to avoid the April 2nd vernissage.                                          

Schoffman, Danton. 2007

MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT

DOES IT SURPRISE ME THAT MY DEAR FRIEND DAVID SCHOFFMAN IS CIRCULATING ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR OUR UPCOMING EXHIBITION IN LOS ANGELES THAT EXCLUDE BOTH MICAH CARPENTIER AND MYSELF??

In a word ... NO.

David Schoffman is a joyless man. Heir to the inventors of Modernism, Schoffman is incapable of the categorical. Every assertion is twined with its adversary. Argument inhibits every assumption. Dialectic drains his capacity for the rapture of unambiguous conviction. The other-hand is tediously collated to the one-hand.

His brain is constantly in a knot of equivocation, an anagram of disquieting sophistry. It's of little import whether the issue at hand is geopolitics or personal relationships, his addiction to cognitive dissonance drains his ability to experience pure pleasure.

This explains his most glaring failures - his failed friendships, his failed attempts at securing a prestigious academic position, his failure to ascend the rungs of the artistic Nomenklatura. But it also explains why his work is so oddly original.

He agreed to our upcoming group exhibition with great reluctance. He feels his work is diminished by the presence of the work of others. It is not competitiveness - Schoffman is far too aloof to indulge in that kind of pettiness - but rather his strong preference for blundering alone, for rummaging through the archives of disinterested intellectual musings in the privacy of his own coiled and entangled brain.

David ... you are forgiven.

IN SEARCH OF FASCIA HEINE

It is with no small degree of wavering uncertainty that I have agreed to exhibit, once again, with my odd and uneasy allies, David Schoffman and the late Micah Carpentier.

The last time I got roped into reclaiming this ancient alliance I flew in from Paris for the opening, lost my luggage, caught a nasty syncytial virus, got mugged on Melrose Avenue and was lured into an indecent and vitriolic argument with Schoffman so bitter that we haven't spoken since.

I also fell temporarily in love with the severely beautiful publisher Fascia Heine whose consummate antipathy for David's work I found fabulously stimulating.

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.