ABSTRACT PORTRAIT // The Strange Stories That Bodies Tell You
words by Michael Grimaldi and Heather Shayne Blakeslee • images by Michael Grimaldi
EXCERPT //
It’s been a long year, especially for parents, I hear.
The second time we speak, he is alone in a different room, smoking what looks like a hand-rolled cigarette; clothing and other artifacts of a hectic life are strewn about, for which he apologizes.
We discuss many topics. The illusion of independence. What it means to spend your days with the same people again and again. To want what you can’t have. The gallows humor of the gross anatomy classroom. The decline of America. The centrality of Moby-Dick in the canon of stories we tell ourselves about what being American is. He gives me a solicited briefing on Renaissance art. All of it is interesting.
Yet. We are also in the middle of a plague that is slowly marching toward three million dead. Grimaldi is an expert in working with cadavers. The sketches he has made are breathtaking, a cold shower in winter, mixed with the heat of entwined bodies. You cannot tell exactly what or whom you are seeing. What is this story in front of you?
Much of Grimaldi’s remarkable work has unidentifiable dread threaded through its unquestionable beauty, and he balances otherworldliness with a deep intimacy. He manages both acute representation and abstraction in a single image, purposefully giving us a recognizable shoulder, a hand, but no color to guide us further. He has mastered pure form, as well as how to muscle the psychological aspects of what makes us human. Grimaldi has identified the sinews of thought and humanity that connect us, which is what elevates his work from a technical marvel into the soulful sublime.
So, in light of Grimaldi’s vexing and charged images, considering the spirit of The Decameron, and taking into account our current plague state of mind—time collapsing, a sense of unreality pervading even the quotidian, unsurity in all things—I ask my interlocuteur to tell me a story. A story about death.
From this one provocation, several particular bodies emerge from darkness to tell their tales.
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