.

C wrinkles her nose.
her parents are still in Italy for
the summer attending to their 'other'
home and when I ask her why she
didn't go with them, she replies,

"why?! just to see a bunch of Italians?!
I can do that here!".

I haven't yet convinced her to take me
with her and whenever I raise the topic
she shakes her head with endearing
annoyance and repeats my name aloud,
emphasizing each letter as if it was
a softly floating leaf. needless to say,
I ask her often just to re-invoke
that same intonation in her voice.

C classifies herself as Italian-Canadian
but prefers to be called Roman. she
insists that she can trace her lineage
back to ancient Rome and proudly
reminds me of this while pushing a
piece of eggplant across her plate.

"what's with the hyphen?", I ask.
"weren't you born here?! and Roman?!
you neoclassicist!".

she smiles. we've had this conversation
about the point of origins so many times
before.

"The Death of Socrates!", she replies.

the word 'neoclassicist' invokes memories.
of trying hard not to fall asleep in warm-dark
lecture halls, of slide-after-slide blurring
the quick succession of facts accompanied
by stories that frame art with the dark-dry
deliverance of academe; its male-dominanted
eurocentric re-view. of course, the subject
of history will always strand subjectivity
inside the guise of absolutes, of facts that
have to be left this way or that. and so it
falls into the lap of any creative thinker
to deconstruct his-story, to tell it in a
different language, as if to challenge the
singular point-of-view. afterall, isn't
the plane of content always subverted
by the plane of its expression? so
instead, C and I imagine (art) history
expressed as a process, a hands-on
reformulation that integrates a studio
frame-of-mind but remains ever-aware
that contemporary rhetoric
still holds it up.

regardless.

neoclassicism.

for C and I, the word is also synonymous
with Jean-Louis David, a french painter
who studied in Rome and later returned
to Paris, somehow changed. in reaction
to the social and moral frivolity of the
Rococco style, he ultimately joined the
French-Italian 18th C. classical revival.
if Rome showed him how to subordinate
colour for the sake of drawing, it also
inspired him to harness the cult of civic
virtues. David's classically cold colours
and severe compositions support his
expression of heroically-Republican
values. stoic self-sacrifice, devotion
to duty, honesty and austerity, all
that typified the emergent Napoleonic
era in France. at the time, critics even
compared The Death of Socrates
to Michelangelo`s Sistine Ceiling.

but Jean-Louis David.

C loves the fact that David studied in
Rome, that he was an active sympathist
of the French Revolution, that he worked
as a political painter and became a Deputy
who voted for the execution of Louis XVI.
even though The Death of Marat was
conceived as a portrait, some historians
claim it elevated portraiture to the level
of universal tragedy. whatever, it remains
his most enduring piece and of the many
thousands of images projected across
the blank screen of my art education,
this piece is one of the few that burns
a permanent spot on the retina.

C and I have often wondered if academe's
historically-celebrated artists would balk
at seeing their personal lives displayed
in public. do the intimate details of any
artist's life matter to the art itself? having
wondered this while creating my own
imagery, I also remember how the impact
of one particular canvas gains something
ethereal by knowing what his marriage
conditions were. C also concedes to
this exception.

after the fall of Robespierre in 1794,
David's Royalist-wife divorced him for
his Revolutionary sympathies. at that time,
he was also imprisoned for the same reasons.
but while behind bars, he painted a picture
and two years later, after showing it to
her, was released on her plea. consequently,
he remarried her, and knowing this lends
another level of understanding to t/his
particular canvas. for this reason and more,
it is a painting that currently conjures
my complete attention.

C loves the proximity of the Roman
shield, the what-will-happen-nextness
of Intervention of the Sabine Women
(Les sabines arretant le combat entre
les romans et les sabins). but for me,
my fascination rests in how David
depicts his women. one in particular,
kneeling partially-clad on the
battlefield with her back to armed
soldiers and a soft confidence on
her face that proves her devotion
to the babies strewn across the ground.
their complete vulnerability, and hers,
while channeling the pure power of
motherhood away from war. she is a
human shield, impenetrable by swords
and arrows and insisting on love.
indeed, all the women on his battle
ground are bound by this unmovable
expression, their singleness of purpose
painted into eyes and lips. an emotion
known only by women for the uninterupted
well-being of their babies. the unbroken
gaze, open palms and steadfast love
becomes the antithesis of war. C and I
both wonder what specific expression
escaped from his own wife's face after
David first showed her this painting.
what was that moment like for her?
and for him?

one can still grasp the emotional content
of this canvas without ever knowing its
historical anchors. but even so, the
painting depicts a war between the
Romans and Sabins. David began
painting it in 1974 while still in
prison to honour his ex-wife and
his underlying message was one of
love prevailing over conflict. but
politically, it was interpreted as
a plea for conciliation in the civil
strife that France suffered after
the Revolution. unintentionally,
this piece re-established David's
fortune by bringing him to the
attention of Napoleon who appointed
him as his official painter. but his
subsequent canvases never played
the same poignant chords of emotion.

David's history paintings, his earlier
works, ones like this one, present a
subdued sensuality that is underscored
by a slightly-subtle eroticism, one
that draws the eye inward in a tender
way. his early works were painted for
their moral and social impact and like
all artist-historians, he filtered the bias
of his specific era through his heart,
a neoclassical perspective layered
like a template across human sentiments,
perhaps obscuring the facts but
revealing a particular interiority.
even if his paintings tie him to
specific historical events, decades
later they still open a very intriguing
emotional door through which to wander.
for me, they remain curiously
contemporary in so many ways.

the power of art is self-expression
and when it gets tangled up in
timeandplace, it occassionally reaches
past the particularities of self
to reveal an assemblage of voices
that connect the artist with the
viewer. like C's hyphenated identity
not stirred up but added onto, it is
the 'and' of self. so I concede to her
hyphens, to her insistance that we
are composed entirely of assemblages,
of ever-shifting multiplicities.
layers that fall back onto the
world in the form of self-expressions,
leaving little maps that rework
our timeandplace from the inside
out. like the plates of food we
are forever rearranging, like
the questions we are forever
recontextualizing and like
the people we are forever
composing.

"Climate, wind, season, hour are
not of another nature than the things,
animals, or people that populate them,
follow them, sleep and awaken within
them. This should be read without a
pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock.
The becoming-evening, becoming-night
of an animal, blood nuptials. Five
o'clock is this animal! This animal
is this place! "The thin dog is running
in the road, this dog is the road,"
cries Virginia Woolf. This is how we
need to feel. Spatiotemporal relations,
determinations, are not predicates
of the thing but dimensions of
multiplicities ... We are all
five-o'clock in the evening, or
another hour, or rather two hours
simultaneously, the optimal and
the pessimal, noon-midnight, but
distributed in a variable fashion."
(Deleuze & Guattari)