Artists

Bio

When the mighty empire at last closes its eyes at night and lays its heavy head down for a final eternal slumber amidst wracked death rattled sabers snored to its own deaf ears, this is what it dreams. It sees realms so grand in ambition they are built to spill, the world’s burdens perpetually misplaced upon those of remarkable innocence and beauty, the ineffably eloquent elegance of a story that only flowers in its very last breath, and visions rife with omens of ill promise. Instant recall in slow-mo replay, self-conjured collective memories, the incessant accumulation of after-image like some retinal feedback loop, what comes to light in David Hochbaum’s paintings is the manifestation of those things we can only imagine when darkness descends. He renders indelible images as scant traces, suggestions of a fearful symmetry in which is etched the memento mori, the painful reminder of loss that can only be gained in the foregoing.

A lover with a coroner’s touch, a poete maudit in his heart whose only atonement is to illustrate the scriptures of civilization’s nefarious ends, a prevaricator and procrastinator extraordinaire gainfully employed by all who are bound to equivocate the inevitable, there is indeed something magical about the way that Hochbaum can diffuse and disperse such simple truths into miasmic enigmas. To say that his art seduces us like no other is not merely to state the obvious, it is to admit our mutual culpability in some unspeakable shared perversity. Like a Gothic Romance transcribed by the hands of Existentialists, David allows us to believe our doubts by doubting our belief, proffering a tarnished faith that shines in our darkest hours to guide anyone who truly wants to find the way to getting lost. He fires the synapses, kindles the heart and strokes the libido of everything good and rotten in our mind’s eye, and just when we’re too intoxicated by the musky aroma of his yet unspoken insinuations he shakes us back to some stuporous consciousness with a rejoinder that these are in fact just pictures. And haunting though they may be, you still know what’s on the other side of this soporific sublime is a quotidian ugliness beyond despair.

A master-weaver of composite realities, is it any wonder that getting anywhere with Hochbaum’s art ultimately involves some sort of escape- a flight of fancy upon some inky-black bird’s foreboding wing or one way passage on a ship of dubious destination- where each semblance of understanding is posed as a dichotomy poised between irreconcilable differences? He’s an insomniac harvesting the fallen defenses and drifting thoughts in the forest of nod, a choreographer of gestures stumbled through like Freudian slips, a man who keeps all the media burning at all hours so that it constantly whispers bittersweet nothings like a moonlit babbling stream of consciousness in the emotional crevices of our psyche. If you ever spent time in that bedlam bar boiling just under the floorboards where David Hochbaum lives and works, you’d understand why he’s so good at accessing these psychologically interstitial places, carving lean-to castles in those compromised spaces where things are not how they reappear to be. His art grows from the reproduction of images, from the diminishment of certainty and loss of authority that is born in the reprocessing of visual data. A cartographer of interpositions, the place he imagines, The Mysterious Action of Memory as he calls it, can only exist as an arcane multi-media where photography, silkscreen, linoleum cuts, pen and ink drawing, acrylic and oil painting, carbon transfer and visionary epistolary converge in a single polyglot. There is unforgettable wisdom here, unutterable save for the lower languages where exiles, fools and madmen talk tongues to one another in the tones of forgotten prophets.

David Hochbaum’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe, and South America. Amongst his many collectors, Hochbaum’s work has been added to the collections of Elton John, HR Giger, Matt Groening, and Emily Deschanel