Shoshana Walfish
“Vischioso”
Curated by Domenico de Chirico
It is in this suspended and burning moment, when lava, freshly emerged from the earth’s depths, breathes before solidifying, giving shape to a new state, twisted and at once permeated between inside and outside, that one finds themselves in front of the pictorial works of Shoshana Walfish: new, radiant, and vibrant creatures, daughters of the world and of their very becoming. Viscous, dense but not overly so, suspended, pulsing, perpetually crystallized in the instant of an ever-unfinished materializatio...
Flesh becomes the undisputed protagonist, a sentient flesh through which the experience of the world is fulfilled. The body becomes a mere process, not a closed structure but an open field, at times disjointed, traversed by forces, flows, branches, and impulses, an incandescent, desirous surface in perpetual transformation. The work thus relinquishes totality and embraces the fragment as the most authentic form of becoming. Here, phenomenology in its queer iteration finds full expression: bodies, influenc...
Reflection on the relationship between space and body thus proves central, as they are co-originating, interdependent, and mutually constituted within lived experience. The body does not simply reside in an objective space; it is what reveals space in its true nature: meaningful, oriented, practicable.
Everything breathes; stratification is impossible, and the collapse of the boundaries between background and surface is striking. Symbolic elements become tools of subversion through which bodily experience is re-centered. With *Vischioso*, one enters a true ontology of flesh, understood not only as living matter but as a capillary weaving of the real, as a principle of intersubjectivity and co-belonging.
The feeling, when moving through Shoshana Walfish’s pictorial visions, is of an even, albeit intricate, fusion of elements that require one another, because, as bodies, they breathe, sweat, observe, smell, and expose themselves to one another. Here, everything influences everything else, participating in a transformative dance that seems never-ending.
The light in these works, sometimes translucent, other times blurred, is always of a supernatural nature. This ethereal dimension permeates every aspect of the artist’s work. A haunting, sometimes immodest atmosphere emerges like a whisper in the mind and spirit, pushing us toward a liminal state that constantly oscillates between mist and glow. It is the personification of a reflection on the imminent stickiness of existence, that menacing shadow of all that is irreversibly inevitable.
Even in works that radiate vitality and brightness, there lies an intimate exploration of the body’s fragility, seen as an ephemeral, fragile, and intricate container that simultaneously evokes the beauty of nature’s cycles of growth and decay, permanence and oblivion.
It is a visceral quality, fluid yet tangible, that defines this series of paintings, which seem to burn silently, as if made of perceptual, organic, and voluptuous lava. The chromatic palette, ranging from the incandescent tones of red, orange, and yellow to the damp hues of moss green, while seemingly hardened and solidified, remains constantly open, imbued with both resistance and dissolution: it reveals and absorbs, sprouts and burns, just like the process of incarnation, of which it is the inescapable voice and instrument, suspended between the antithesis of an apple and a skull. Thus, in this continuous oscillation between the defined and the undefined, beyond the margins of consciousness, Vischioso stands as a tribute to that fire which Heraclitus called arché, the primordial principle from which all things arise.
