But let’s back up. Before devoting himself to the art world, David Whitfield worked for a long time as a cartographer and later as a psychiatric director. These are fundamental experiences that deeply nourish his creative imagination and which soon lead to a paintings capable of delving into the depths of the human psyche. Thus began the first artistic experiments that follow a surrealist orientation. Using an airbrush and colored inks in this first phase, the artist achieves results of great formal refinement and precision. Perceiving, however, in these technical and formal virtuosity, a rigid art lacking in emotional intensity, Whitfield opens the horizons of his painting to the most fluid and free watercolor experiments, and then embraces the sonorous chromatic bodies of an acrylic technique conveyed in a expressionistic approach.

Thus we come to the artworks exposed in this exhibition; the result of a well-established technique which thanks to a easy-going pictorial conduct, a brightly colored chromatic sound and a prolific compositional imagination, investigate with exquisite subtlety the multiple facets of the human mind and soul. The painter’s sharp observing spirit does not back away from the emotions, the hidden fears, or the desires of a cloudier intimacy, dropping masks and social conditioning and transforming the paintings into real high-tension stage pamphlets.

A tangle of feelings and emotions is intertwined with the overlapping of deformed and weightless figures that, almost like spectral visions, move in unstable and undefined spaces, playing with chromatic transparencies. It is the human condition, masterfully represented by the English artist in ecstasy of the hues.

An existentialism that of Whitfield that from a formal point of view translates into a deforming aesthetic pathology, which leads to a deflagration of the figurative plot, whose fragments are held together by a strong sense of color. If the deformed and decomposed bodies, in which the soul of modern man is reflected, seem to remember the defigurations of Francis Bacon, the incredible tension between the overflowing energy and a raw drama, that distinguishes every Whitfield painting, is completely original.

The gracious figures of the Newcastle artist, although corroded by the friction of the world, lay bare the social masks, border the frightening inner chasms and raise the veil of hypocrisy, unveiling the tumult of human existence throughout its infinite variety.

So Whitfield takes us step by step in the great or small comedy we perform every day, in its creators, in social dissimulations and frustrations through very modern and lively “conversation piece”, that in a succession of short circuits between reality and fiction, between being and to appear, comedians and not, remind us that in the “long journey of life many will be the masks we will meet and so few the faces ” (Luigi Pirandello).

Virginia Bazzechi Ganucci Cancellieri