Homage To Death: David Ligare’s New Paintings - Article by Donald Kuspit

Magna Fide Study, 3, 2014, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24", Courtesy of  Winfield Gallery
 

By DONALD KUSPIT November 19th, 2025

David Ligare is now eighty, ten years beyond the biblical allotted three score and ten:  death is not far from his mind, as the Tomb of Archimedes, 2022 makes dramatically clear.  Archimedes, 287-212 BC, a brilliant Greek mathematician, was the first to calculate the surface area and volume of a sphere.  “According to Cicero, his tomb consisted of a sphere surmounting a cylinder,” which is what Ligare shows us.  It stands in a calm pastoral setting, in front of a flourishing green tree, its right edge lit by the light of a distant, seemingly setting sun, its beam-like reflection visible in two bodies of water, separated by a horizontal stretch of earth, with a few smaller trees on it.  The same sun, casting a beam of light, is visible through a circle “cut” in a rock arch, the circle a kind of halo, in Rock Arch with Sun, 2023.  In Magna Fide, 2014 the same tombstone, a sphere perfectly balanced on a cube with what seems to be a flame in front of it set against a pitch black rectangular ground implicitly an entrance to the underworld of death, is mounted on an altar as though in denial or at least defiance of death.  It is an unresolved tension between death and life, but the presence of death, in the form of the inorganic lifeless rocks, is more conspicuous and insistent than life, however much it rises above the entrance to the underworld—the grave, marked by the geometric tombstone.  “Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone,” Cezanne wrote, that is, as fundamentally a mathematical abstraction, more particularly a geometrical phenomenon--which is what Ligare does with greater insistence and subtlety than Cezanne, as Ligare’s geometrically intricate rock formations show—but also without forfeiting a consciousness of its physical rawness, as indisputable and confrontational as its geometrical form.  I suggest Ligare’s raw rock formations epitomize death, while his geometrical tombstone, epitomizing eternal mathematical truth and with that immortality, implies that death can be transcended, or at least, in the famous words of the Bible, “has no sting” if one believes in the eternal verities—such as geometrical forms.    

Rock Arch with Sun, 2023, Oil on canvas, 60 x 84", Courtesy of  Winfield Gallery

 Arcadian Landscape with an Owl, 2024, Oil on canvas, 20 x 24", Courtesy of  Winfield Gallery

I suggest that Ligare’s Archimedean tomb—classicism with a mathematical vengeance— is an ironic example of creative destruction in art.  It implies the discreditation and with it the obsoleteness of modernist and postmodernist innovation in art from Cubism and nonobjective art to conceptual art in all its theatrical—performative-- varieties.  Just as “the process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism,” as Joseph Schumpter famously argued, so it is the essential fact about post-classical modern art—so-called avant-garde art, which is capitalist (not so unwittingly, as its market value, which often stands in for its aesthetic value and “innovative difference,” indicates), by reason of its relentless replacement of one movement by another, and with that the unclarity and uncertainty of artistic value, not to say the credibility and importance of one movement rather than another, one work of art rather than another, bringing with it questions about its “modernity” or “postmodernity,” whether its newness is shocking or boring.  I suggest that Ligare’s death-predicated classicism—an update on Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego—indicates a revival of classicism may be in the offing, out of stoical necessity. WM