David Diao’s postcards from the edge of late modernism

Since the 1980s, the painter David Diao has sought to occupy the position of a critical insider with respect to some of the modernist painting of the last century. Through the exploitation of strategies ordinarily associated with postmodernism – appropriation, pastiche and blank irony – Diao has managed successfully to develop a body of work whose aesthetic and narrative content differs markedly from that of his peers. Disavowing pronouncements on the irrevocable failure of modernism, Diao opts to place the resources of expression found in works by Kazimir Malevich to Barnett Newman at the disposal of a uniquely autobiographical project of cultural memory and retrieval.