Baudelaire

Baudelaire takes its name and its fire from the French poet's call to intoxication: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish." Damico renders the poet's likeness in thick, molten strokes of red, yellow, and orange, a face caught mid-dissolution between clarity and excess. The paint itself becomes a kind of intoxication, built up until it threatens to overwhelm the form beneath it.

The portrait belongs to a body of work Damico devotes to poets, esotericists, and the maudit, artists who lived against the grain of their societies. His figures are less likenesses than structures for holding energy, built in resistance to what he calls the "ultra modern commercial world" and its narrowing sense of what a life can mean.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Massimo Damico builds his portraits the way a sculptor works stone, layer by layer, until the figure emerges from raw material. Born on Italy's Amalfi Coast and trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, Damico has lived and worked across Barcelona, London, Berlin, and New York, where his time sketching subway riders and city streets shaped the psychological intensity that defines his mature work. He now lives and works in Prague.