| David Shapiro paints monochromatic watercolors from photographs culled from fashion publications and art historical plates of classical sculpture. They are delicately and meticulously rendered (to the point of disguising even the fact of brushstrokes) wash drawings of immediately recognizable and readily categorizable single figure subjects. The externals of Shapiro’s work go down so smoothly one is left with a kind of unsettling emptiness. With their white frame and ground on a white gallery wall they hang reserved and secretive, threatening to melt, chameleon-like, into their surroundings. | 
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Robert Gustafson on David Shapiro
David Shapiro paints monochromatic watercolors from photographs culled from fashion publications and art historical plates of classical sculpture. They are delicately and meticulously rendered (to the point of disguising even the fact of brushstrokes) wash drawings of immediately recognizable and readily categorizable single figure subjects. The externals of Shapiro’s work go down so smoothly one is left with a kind of unsettling emptiness. With their white frame and ground on a white gallery wall they hang reserved and secretive, threatening to melt, chameleon-like, into their surroundings.
They conceal a stubborn and rich oddness. With subjects so obviously suited for irony, there is an eerie lack of irony in the work at the precise points where it might be expected. On first glance one looks for the work to be critical of the shallowness of modern fashion/celebrity culture, or the irrelevance of historical objects made banal by the technological dissemination of their images—or if not to be critical, to embrace them with tongue inserted firmly into cheek—to be above them in one way or another. But Shapiro’s tongue seems to be more in position for hours of French kissing, his eye full of an unlikely and innocent compassion.
In a portrait of a bare-breasted Kate Moss on the beach, Shapiro seems to handle sexuality with both a hedonist’s openness and a monk’s sensitive detachment. The picture he has selected to paint captures Kate in a pose of uncharacteristic psychological intimacy almost unrelated to her nudity—a chink has opened in her trademark smoldering ice-queen Lolita stare as if the wet wind and waves had momentarily unsettled her. She looks behind her and away from the viewer. She looks a little concerned, a little engaged. Her breasts sag just gently earthward in an uncharacteristic disclosure of age and mortality. Her sexuality is present but the sugar has not been extracted and isolated from the fruit like a drug—rather it appears as real and normal as the ocean, powerful and peaceful.
In one of the classical sculpture paintings of a helmeted Greek warrior, Riace, the bronze head becomes something of an incidental vehicle for oddly hypnotic details rather than merely a reference to a historical figure and an art historical period—the fact that he is missing an eye, the pattern of his beard, the oxidation of the bronze—all of which Shapiro magnifies and accentuates in ultramarine blue. The detail becomes the subject.
Ultimately, these watercolors are ruthlessly understated, unironic, and loving, strategically naïve re-inspections of wildly overstated subject matter. Shapiro seems passionate about reinventing these subjects with delicate attention and ghostly brushwork.
