Shoshana Walfish
"Vischioso"
Curated by Domenico de Chirico
It is in that suspended and searing moment-when lava, freshly emerged from the earth's core, breathes before solidifying, shaping a new state, twisted and yet intertwined between interior and exterior-that one finds oneself before the paintings of Shoshana Walfish: new, luminous, and vibrant creatures, daughters of the world and of their own becoming. Viscous-dense but not overly so-suspended, pulsating, perpetually crystallized in the instant of an ever-unfinished concretization, Walfish's visions absorb and engulf all that they encounter, saturated with sly and languid brushstrokes which, like thirsty tongues, savor and dissolve the boundaries of the incarnation of being.
In their presence, everything bleeds or seeps; the real and the surreal lay down their arms in favor of a liminal state where corporeality reigns supreme. On this stage, the disintegration of the original figure-of which only an eye, a hand, a fold, or a scrap of flesh remains-bears a post-structuralist imprint, as a refusal of a pre-established and canonical identity. Flesh becomes the undisputed protagonist-a sentient flesh through which the experience of the world is fulfilled. The body becomes a process rather than a closed structure-an open field, at times disjointed, traversed by forces, flows, branches, and impulses: a scorching, desiring surface, perpetually in transformation.
The artwork thus renounces totality and embraces the fragment as the most authentic form of becoming. It is here that phenomenology, in its queer iteration, finds full expression: bodies, shaped by context, simultaneously shape it. The background is no longer a neutral space; the body fragments and becomes part of a broader journey, one that interrogates what it truly means to inhabit a body.
The relationship between space and body thus becomes central, as they are co-original, interdependent, and mutually constituted through lived experience. The body does not merely reside in an objective space; it is that through which space reveals its true nature: meaningful, oriented, practicable.
Everything breathes, layering becomes impossible, and the collapse of boundaries between background and surface is striking. Symbolic elements become tools of subversion, restoring centrality to bodily experience. With "Vischioso," we enter a true ontology of flesh-understood not only as living matter, but as a capillary fabric of reality, as a principle of intersubjectivity and co-belonging.
The sensation one has while traversing Shoshana Walfish's painterly visions is that of an even, though intricate, fusion of elements that require one another-for as bodies, they breathe, sweat, watch, smell, and expose themselves to each other. Here, everything influences everything else, taking part in a transformative dance that seems to have no end.
The light in these works, at times translucent, at others dimmed, is always of a supernatural nature. This ethereal dimension permeates every aspect of the artist's oeuvre. A disquieting, at times unseemly, atmosphere manifests as a breath murmuring through the mind and spirit, pushing us toward a liminal state that constantly oscillates between haze and glow. It is the personification of a reflection on the impending viscosity of existence-that menacing shadow of all that is irreversibly inescapable.
Even in the works that radiate vitality and luminosity, there lies an intimate exploration of the body's fragility-seen as an ephemeral, delicate, and intricate container, while also echoing the beauty of natural cycles of growth and decay, permanence and oblivion.
What characterizes this series of paintings is a fluid yet concrete visceral quality: they seem to burn silently, as though made of perceptive, organic, and voluptuous lava. The chromatic palette-ranging from incandescent reds, oranges, and yellows to the damp shades of moss
green-though appearing hardened and solidified, remains constantly open, steeped in both resistance and dissolution: it reveals and absorbs, sprouts and blazes, just like the process of incarnation, of which it is the inescapable voice and instrument, caught in the antithesis between an apple and a skull.
Thus, in this constant oscillation between the defined and the undefined-beyond the edges of consciousness-Vischioso rises as an ode to that fire which Heraclitus called arché, the primal principle from which all things arise.
