DOWN IN THE DOGMAS

Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria

Scratch the prickly pelt of any individual of consequence and you will find a damaged soul disfigured  by an unrequited romance. My good friend, the Los Angeles conceptual artist David Schoffman, is no exception.

Behind the bluster and beneath the ebullient energy is the rotting marrow of bile and regret. To call it heartache would be like describing a vicious gale as a benign drizzle. A listless unforgiving melancholy is the basso continuo, the leitmotif, the je ne sais plus of his outwardly charmed life. 

The cause of his despair can be summed up in two mellifluous yet vinegary words:

D A H L I A     D A N T O N 

For years Schoffman chased the beautiful Danton like a rabid rattled terrier. He sent her flowers accompanied by long lyrical notes full of the kind of slushy sincerity only a simpering adolescent would deem effective. Their epistolary romance was a turbulent literary tour-de-force of one-way wishful thinking. Danton teased while my good friend David sniveled in the syrup of his unanswered affection.

Danton and Schoffman, date unknown.

  
Danton took great joy in tightening the leash that led my friend David into the funk of spiritual infirmity. She rejoiced in his suffering and celebrated in his presumed celibacy. While Schoffman diminished into a walking dirge Danton jived and jitterbugged into an amphitheater of ecstatic cruelty.

Of course, a situation as untenable as this could not go on forever. Schoffman plunged into a series of lubricious romances in a futile attempt to exorcize the Danton demon. He capered from couch to couch and ricocheted into countless fruitless affairs until finally resigning into impotent exhaustion.

He remains bitter to this day and it could be argued that his abandonment of painting in favor of the more strident forms of theoretical expression is due to his utter failure at love.

In the end we are all rewarded by the deeply vague aesthetic speculations of this very gifted artist plagued with a profound distrust of the senses.