Separate Reality is pleased to present the gallery’s debut exhibition, The Shifting Point, a retrospective of California artist David Florimbi’s paintings. Over the past forty years, Florimbi has established a dynamic, dream-like visual lexicon that expands the limits and possibilities of representation in painting. “Florimbi presents us with figure after figure…erotic if troubled…heavenly and sacred in import…again and again, we see central figures floating, or suspended in the sky–infinite space, as it were,” writes art critic Donald Kuspit. 

Florimbi’s work generates an internal language that responds to archetypal codes of meaning. Figures and motifs resonate deeply in the subconscious of the viewer, drawing upon Jungian analysis and dreamwork. The various mythologies evoked conjure Goya’s Caprichos or Blake’s hallucinatory allegories. Bodies of water blur and bleed across the horizon, the sky falls open and apart. Figures are foregrounded yet seem to recede into their constituent parts. Clouds appear again and again as a destabilizing backdrop. These archetypal images invite the viewer into the painting on open ground, yet once inside create a feeling of the uncanny. With watery, gestural strokes, it’s hard to know where the paintings begin or end, revealing the paintings as seemingly evacuated of time.

Grounded in his commitment to destabilizing space and time, Florimbi utilizes charcoal, oil paints, canvas and paper to create a grid that he then proceeds to rupture. As seen in Florimbi’s Requiem for Terry  (2007), rectangles of paper are arranged in a grid-like formation into which Florimbi interrogates the constructive elements of his images, which range from the emotional and atmospheric to the more classically derived, often with a winking sense of humor. The presence of blue remains a constant pulse throughout Florimbi’s work. While it’s tempting to see blue as a temporary fixation—such as the famous periods of Klein or Picasso—for Florimbi, it’s the lifeblood of his visual language and a career-spanning relationship. Blue, along with the rest of Florimbi’s motifs, takes on its own symbolism and mythos, a language that can be read almost like tarot.The Shifting Point highlights Florimbi’s preoccupations and investigations, and showcases a selection of his most ambitious work. 

The Shifting Point is on view at Separate Reality (111 Santa Barbara Street, #C, Santa Barbara, CA 93101) from September 19th - October 12th. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday 1-6 and by appointment.