Sunday November 15, 2015 at 7:15 PM, Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas
Wednesday November 18 at 5:15 PM, IFC Center

David Shapiro’s “Missing People,” which won Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival earlier this fall, shadows art gallery director Martina Batan in her twin missions better to grasp the past lives of two people now gone. One is Roy Ferdinand, an African-American man in pre-Katrina New Orleans – crime capital of America at the time of his death – who, at the urging and funding of a local art dealer, chronicled the culture of destruction around him. Martina has collected around 200 of his sometimes lurid drawings, keeping small pictures of them on hand to show to other people. The second missing person is her younger brother, Jeffery Batan, who in 1978 was violently killed, aged 14. His body was found in a yard near the family home in Queens, but murderer and motive remain unsolved.

The film opens with her description of this event, accompanied by news footage. Restless since that day, then a freshman at School of Visual Arts, Martina, now in mid-life, believes that something like closure is due, a resolution that will bring her some measure of rest. The accumulation of Ferdinand’s artwork, untutored illustration essentially, is an ongoing stopgap offering provisional or stand-in meanings, as if the depictions of murder and social decay by this artist, who often lived on the streets, could fill in her brother’s untold story. Martina visits Ferdinand’s sisters, Fay and Michele, in New Orleans, to learn more about him, which becomes a process of familial bonding.

Home in New York, Martina engages a private investigator to pursue the still-open case of her brother’s murder and surface what he can. This, too, is a form of progress, but its disclosures, ever more unexpected, throw her into new narratives that answer sets of questions she’d never know to ask. The speed and intrigue of the film move in a golden ratio, where a slow arch gathers momentum as it centers in on itself. Several points in the story could be a feasible ending, but as it continues, its psychological depth intensifies and keeps turning.

The documentary is about meaning-making as much as it is about Martina, in the film’s search for connection with her – finding her within a fog of her growing emotional vacancy – as she ties together what she can of her memories, her fears, and recent revelations about her brother’s life. Our contact with her is threaded through her contact with herself. Meaning is in moments suspended for the sake of continuation; continuation is sometimes halted for finding moments of reflexive meaning.

The film runs back and forth between clips of Martina’s present life and footage from decades past, the unfolding of who Roy Ferdinand was alongside the piecemeal construction of Jeffery’s life and death. This fluid structure is consistent in the way it keeps the viewer involved, on every level, as seemingly disparate elements of people’s lives, their interiors and exteriors, come in and out of view. Most remarkable is the balance the filmmaker maintains in documenting Martina’s ongoing struggles and snapping points. Ultimately, Shapiro respects the craft of non-fiction cinema as much as he does Martina Batan.

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David Shapiro, who died earlier this year after a long struggle with cancer, was a mentor and friend.  A fellow abstract painter, he was as generous, open, and honest as he was talented and prolific. In the thirty years or so we knew each other, I saw his work grow in depth, expressiveness, and clarity, without conforming to the latest fad, fashion, or “ism” in the art world.

Born in Brooklyn in 1944, Shapiro trained at Pratt Institute and Indiana University, where he earned an MFA in 1968, and attended the Skowhegan School of Art in Maine. He taught at several institutions, including Barnard College and Parsons.

Continuous study and practice of Buddhism greatly influenced his work as well as his daily life.  From Asian art he embraced a great sense of stillness, as well as an appreciation of calligraphy, and a muted sense of color. Yet somehow, to me at least, there was something of New York City in his work, something of the place where so many cultures collide. He was always alert to his immediate surroundings, be that the texture on a wall in raking light, or a pattern of clouds reflecting off a glass building at sunset. The “now” somehow seeped into the ancient.

Shapiro almost always worked in series, the titles of which reflected what he sought to achieve, what he sought to approach. In his Clearing series two adjacent squares speak to each other: dense with open, airy with watery, luminous with solemn. Despite the binary nature of the series the pieces seem to transcend dualism. The series title itself invites different meanings: a clearing in a wood, a clearing of sky, or, better yet, a clearing of mind.

Origin and Return is a large meditative series where each piece contains four distinct parts, a vertical always followed by three squares, woven together to form a unified long horizontal work.  Woven together thick lines may be followed by concentric circles, leading into watery thin lines, and finally two straight lines or a circle, or even meandering thick lines again. Intuition plays a leading role here, not logic or formula.

In the Savasan series (named for the recumbent yoga pose) six squares connect horizontally in both compelling and surprising ways. In Seer, Actor, Knower, Doer verb becomes noun, as four tall verticals join to form a square.

Shapiro sometimes referred to “allostasis” – stability through change – as a goal of his paintings and prints, with seemingly opposite or disparate forces uniting as one. I remember David relating to me how often a brushstroke on the canvas would coincide with the arc of his breath as he painted, outer connecting with inner, spiritual with material. A mark was not only an extension of his body, but of his very essence. He believed in painting as not only as expression of his self, but as a means to understand his non-self, all that wasn’t David Shapiro in the universe. His poise and steadfastness in this regard enabled him to create a body of work over the years that both evolved and held together. He achieved mastery but avoided the facile or the obvious.

Despite a great and sincere modesty, Shapiro had over eighty solo shows in galleries and museums across the United States, as well as in Japan, England, and Canada. In addition to painting and drawing he created more than fifty editions of prints, often selecting Nepalese or Japanese papers of unusual texture to which he frequently added natural elements such as pumice, metal filings, marble dust, and graphite to enrich and enliven the works. His work is represented in many private, corporate, and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya, Japan.

The post Disparate Forces Uniting As One: David Shapiro, 1944 to 2014 appeared first on artcritical.