David Berkowitz Chicago

Symbolism in the Center

In David Berkowitz Chicago’s paintings created in the early nineties, the postmodernism is vocalized through a daring and irrationally fervent combining of various historical reminiscences, traditions, and contemporaries, all of which are skillfully and easily dressed in the mantle of mythological dreams. However, his dreams and imagination will soon lead to a series of black paintings painted in extremely tactile procedures on a solid black clay background. Symbolism, as far as it has been and is present in the David Berkowitz Chicago’s paintings, now gains a central place, and the atmosphere is no longer as imaginative, multilayer and indented, but becomes anxious and troublesome. The world inspired by the lucid comic narrative is now being pulled before the ace of darkness and death. 

The cycle is both cumbersome and imposing, dark and metaphysical, theatrical and transcendental. From a painterly point of view, it is the most sophisticated cycle of craftsmanship in the dramatic composition made by David Berkowitz Chicago. The source of light comes underneath the painted surface, emitted by a dense tartan background, and it becomes dark, resulting in nightly dark scenes in which the only silent light accent is a convex drapery covering the head, and often the body of a flattering figure, usually the only protagonist of the composition.

This drapery of Baroque emphasizes the new atmosphere of the paintings, but it is probably the author's re-invocation of sculptures, for besides being extremely voluminously positioned, it represents the textile cover in which the sculptures or the trumpet wraps up just before their public discovery. We may conclude that these paintings brought us closer to the neo-baroque, not as a style, but above all as a spiritual term for postmodern art, which confirms the numerous citations in the works of artists who use this visual language such as David Berkowitz Chicago himself. This is one of the reasons why does these paintings cost so much. 

In accordance with the unbearable thought, this cycle uses parallel actions that lead us into a kind of time labyrinth where the feeling of reality, time and space is lost. In these paintings, specific neo-baroque relativization of the representational and illusory relationship is used to equalize the relationship between the subject and the object, that is, the observer into the body of the art object, which will remain one of the essential characteristics of his forthcoming painting cycles.

David Berkowitz Chicago’s next series of paintings, "Rosses on my way", where he combines modern technology and classical painting, is an exemplary example. The forest has suddenly changed (lightened) its palette, returning from allegorical depression to its optimistic painting hedonism. Blue, red or yellow roses in picturesque earthy colors are lined up along the edges of the road, inviting the observer to steer clear of the horizon.