When an artist pays homage to his influences and friends in his own work, the result can be meaningful. In several of Michael David’s works made with a substrate of wood panels supporting shattered black mirrors, his content seems to be referencing his artistic heroes, perhaps including Captain Beefheart, the cover of whose 1971 album Mirror Man, designed by Michael Mendel, depicts a shattered mirror in a frame. The glorious darkness of David’s works makes them all vanitas of one sort or another — the aging artist asking the viewer to reflect on the ephemeral nature of life and to consider that we are only on this Earth for a fleeting moment.
David has contemplated the great masters of painting in his own work for decades. His early work was figurative. In his exhibition Requiem for a Gangster at the erstwhile Lowe Gallery in 2007, David presented a suite of paintings that contemplated death and machismo through postmodern reworkings of the figure of the matador in Édouard Manet’s The Dead Man (also known as Death of a Bullfighter; 1864) in David’s oeuvre as well as the artist’s fixation on death.
David’s ongoing dialogue with other artists through layered references and his preoccupation with death as a theme both re-appear in his current show, Nighttime with Dreams and Mirrors at Johnson Lowe Gallery through June 28. No Regrets (for Johns and Mapplethorpe; 2024), is elegant; a shattered mirror lies just at the center top of the panel in an image that resembles a skull. The skull might be a simple image, but David’s art’s historical and personal references add a layer of meaning. Robert Mapplethorpe is known for his black-and-white photographic portraits, particularly his Self Portrait (1988), which he made a year before his death from complications of HIV/AIDS at the age of 42. In this self-portrait, we see only the artist’s face and hand. Mapplethorpe, holding a walking stick with a small skull on top, dissolves into the darkness of the richest black. David also uses a walking stick as he is mobility impaired, an injury related to his work with encaustic.
David’s title also refers to the exhibition Jasper Johns: Regrets at MoMA in 2014, which was itself an instance of an artist thinking about another artist. Johns found in an auction catalog a photograph of the painter Lucian Freud by John Deakin that was commissioned by Francis Bacon to use as the basis for paintings. The photo of Freud was folded and scarred by Bacon as he used it, and this version of it, bearing the marks of Bacon’s process, inspired the Johns exhibition.
By titling the work for these other artists, David adds another link to this referential chain and re-imagines Mapplethorpe’s memento mori. In the adjoining rooms of the Johnson Lowe gallery is an exhibition by David’s close friend, artist Judy Pfaff, which includes a grid of drawings in black and white oil stick and encaustic on vintage paper. These are of closeup views of sunflowers simply titled Michael in another lovely moment of connection and understanding between artists.
David’s process of making these works is revealing. He attaches black mirrors to wood panels, then shatters the mirrors in particular parts of the panel, sometimes at just one point. One can imagine the artist purposefully choosing where his hammer will make impact, attempting to achieve control over the uncontrollable. The fractures and shards are then reinforced with resin and adorned with small bits of color made with acrylic paint.
In considering David’s process and choice of medium, one might also reflect on Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) made from 1915 and worked on until 1923. In 1927, Duchamp’s work was shattered in transit; in 1936, the artist restored the large glass by reconnecting the shards. Duchamp declared in 1954 that the cracks improved the composition. David’s work, however, is expressionistic and lacks the intellectual detachment of Duchamp. Consider, for example, that David may see himself in the mirrored glass as he shatters it in a highly personal encounter with the boundary between past and present. Nevertheless, it is clear that David’s historical references are not accidental. Through them, David aligns his work with the modernist canon.
St. Sebastian (2024) is a vertical work composed of two equal square panels on top of one another, a double square. Van Gogh used this proportion in almost all of his last paintings, albeit in a horizontal format. In St. Sebastian, David emphasizes the division of the double square, as the top panel is black with shattered glass placed with the delicacy of a mosaic, and the bottom panel contains a silver splintered mirror with small amounts of rose acrylic paint and a burnt umber colored stain. The title of the work refers to the saint who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows.
Michael David, “The Lion in Winter,” 2023-2024.
Three other works are titled The Heavens Above and the Earth Below (I, II, III; 2024). All seem to be lamentations, perhaps reflecting the way the last few years have been such a time of sadness and grief for so many. These three panels are caked with paint and tar paper, their patina on more of concrete than the mirror surface, which is somewhere buried underneath the artist’s reflection.
In Nighttime with Dreams and Mirrors, David uses black mirrors as he would have used encaustic paint a decade ago. The surfaces are complex; they call up Aztec cosmology, where black mirrors are used symbolically both to communicate with the dead and to change the present for the living. Black mirrors are also credited with revealing secret knowledge. David’s dark mirrors seamlessly embody beauty, grief and the temporal. As an artist, David is a kind of sorcerer; his materials are the symbolic making of his brew.
Michael David, “No Regrets (for Johns and Mapplethorpe; detail),” 2024.
