Encaustic, like oil painting, was invented in antiquity. Apart from the modernists Diego Rivera and Arthur Dove, encaustic was not used for over 1,500 years by any major Western painter until Jasper Johns revived its usage in his early paintings of slowly built up, easily recognizable, flat symbols beginning in 1954, as he sought an alternative to Abstract Expressionist  imagery, gesture, spontaneity, and rhetoric. Once exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in January 1958, Johns’s pictures became an overnight success, though his chosen medium was not embraced by other prominent painters, except for Brice Marden, who put wax to different use than Johns in his early paintings, beginning in 1965, after contemplating Johns’s retrospective exhibition at the Jewish Museum the previous year. 

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The reason I bring this up is that Michael David’s early paintings were executed with encaustic in a vigorous style paying homage to Abstract Expressionism, long after its heyday. David had tried painting with oils and acrylics but found them “too fast, and too physical.” His timing was excellent, as there was a resurgence of interest in painting, though predominantly of the figurative Neo-Expressionist kind. David took on symbols (1979-1985), some of which turned out to be more controversial than those selected earlier by Johns. He increased their tangibility by constructing them out of joined blocks of wood and burying those irregularly shaped supports projecting from the wall under layers of mostly monochrome encaustic. Some of these works, with their heavy accretions, resemble archeological finds.

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Soon enough, David secured representation by Knoedler Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he had almost annual one-person exhibitions from 1984 through1999, but felt out of place among the more established artists on that gallery’s roster and far removed from the downtown scene. Circa 1990, Bill Arnett introduced David to abstract painter Thornton Dial, whose studios in Alabama he visited repeatedly, “where I was struck by that natural artist’s use of materials containing meaning.” Down South, David also discovered the work of Lonnie Holley and Mary T. Smith, “who were making work about Jesus or being black. They were using abstract methods without knowing abstract technologies.” 

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The first pictures David made since suffering paralysis in both legs in 1999 are the abstract, almost monochrome, sponge-like Chorten Paintings (2001-2006), bulging forward with their excess of paint. (A chorten is a Tibetan Buddhist shrine or monument.) These works follow the path that was charted by those masters of matter Lynda Benglis, Eugène Leroy, and Bram Bogaert. David eventually went on to make paintings depicting the figure in his Fallen Toreadors series (mixed-media, 2003) inspired by Edouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador, while channeling Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings to heighten the sense of doom in what he considers to be self-portraits (according to John Yau). In 1998, David had painted Self Portrait as a Golem (oil and encaustic on panel), a foreboding image alluding to his Jewish Ukrainian roots. 

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David is a historicizing artist who takes on earlier beliefs and traditions by way of admired predecessors and the images and ideas they brought forth. To the aforementioned, we may add Michelangelo and Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which the artist brought up in conversation, and Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, which is referenced by the title of David’s The Bride Stripped Bare (2015–2025). While the French master’s work on glass was accidentally shattered during transportation, David deliberately broke and pieced together shards of mirror. 

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David’s recent works include mirrors that are carefully broken to obtain varying configurations, then reassembled like a loose puzzle, or mosaic. Mosaics and mirrors were invented in antiquity, and both mirroring effects and mirrors have an established pedigree in painting, long before Las Meninas. Unlike that picture, which engages so profoundly with what lies outside the painting, David’s mirroring fragments include us in the work, which is completed, in the artist’s view, when we appear in it.

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We have long been fascinated with breakdowns: spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical. We are all broken, to an extent, and break down further as we age. Did David’s illness starting in 1999 eventually lead him to the imagery of smashed mirrors? Fragments and ruins, variations on which we see in David’s oeuvre from the get-go, are things that were probably first found fascinating for what they could teach about the past, and only subsequently considered beautiful by artists and viewers, most evidently from the Early Renaissance (ca. 1400) onward.

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Willem de Kooning famously stated that flesh is the reason why oil painting was invented. The tortured mixed-media surfaces of David’s works function on one level as aging skins, with their wrinkles and creases, translucency and opacity, transitions in color and tone, tumescence, fresh bruises, dried scabs, and old scars galore doing their best to shield infection-prone flesh, muscle, and sinew from the dangers beyond, but failing to do so. Failing rhymes with flaying. This brings up the vainglorious Marsyas. David’s Flaying of Marsyas of 2020 constitutes a response to the late painting on the same theme by Titian. The aging David, like his namesake, took on yet another giant. David’s paintings are in more ways than one works the viewer is invited to complete. But isn’t this true of all forms of cultural production?

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Michaël Amy

May 2026

Rochester, New York 

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